LEADING FROM THE FRONT

A Story Of Science

LEADING FROM THE FRONT

BRICS Astronomy Magazine sat down with Scientist and Research Astronomer, David Buckley (SAAO, South Africa), who shared his story and thoughts on the Astronomy sector in SA and BRICS Countries.

Can you give us a brief background of your work in the Astronomy sector?

I am from New Zealand originally and I studied towards my doctorate in astronomy at the Australian National University and following that I took up a post-doctoral fellowship position at the University of Cape Town. I arrived at the end of 1988 then in June 1991 I took a job at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) as a research astronomer, with some instrumentation responsibility.

I am a scientist and I have developed experience over the years in astronomical telescopes and instruments, in short straddling the science engineering divide. That led to me joining the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) project when it was first mooted in 1996. In 1999 I took on a formal role as the SALT project scientist as a member of the project team that built that telescope. That was about a six-year long activity to design and construct SALT, which still is the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. It was funded by an international consortium, the SALT Foundation, with partners from 11 countries, including South Africa.

South Africa contributed about 35% of the total budget to build it but most of the actual construction work was carried out in South Africa. So it was a case where there was also a nice spin-off benefit to South Africa in that money was brought into the country from our partners to help us build the telescope. Of course apart from building a telescope for science work it also had a lot of other tangible benefits for example getting engineers involved in forefront technology in the area of optical astronomy, also supporting young researchers and engineers in the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) area. There was always a strong component of the project that we call a spin-off benefit to a wider society.

I was the project scientist until completion of the telescope and up until it became operational, which was at the end of 2005. During that year my role transitioned to astronomy operations manager where I was in charge of the scientific operation of the telescope which involved managing a staff of about half a dozen astronomers, several operators and some software developers. I continued in that role until 2015 and also in the middle of that period, in 2010, I was appointed as the SALT science director which was an appointment by the international board that governed SALT.

SAAO had the contract to run the telescope on behalf of the SALT Foundation. For this period I was pretty much focused on managing the night time science operations and user support provided by the SALT Astronomy Operations group. Thereafter, my role became a more high level advocate for the telescope, when I was appointed as SALT Global Ambassador, to promote the telescope globally and also potentially to find new partners who wanted access to SALT.

In 2020, I was approached to help with the re-launched African Astronomical Society (AfAS), particularly the science direction of the society. So since early 2020, I’ve been the chair of the science committee within AfAS which has expanded my involvement in the astronomy activities on the African continent.

In 2015 I also got involved in BRICS, when South Africa became the country that led the astronomy development within BRICS and the secretariat for the astronomy working group was established in South Africa within the Department of Science and Technology (now Department of Science and Innovation. From 2015, and every year since then, I’ve been involved in the astronomy working group meetings to develop policy and programs, in particular, develop the BRICS Astronomy flagship program that was launched last year.

That involves all five BRICS countries, with currently 120 astronomers involved so far. In terms of the program, it’s at various stages of development within each country, with initial activities beginning in South Africa following initial seed funding for the program from the Department of Science and Innovation.

This has allowed for the recruitment of three people within South Africa to assist in the program’s development, namely a project coordinator, software developer and data scientist. These people are embedded at the SAAO andthe University of the Western Cape (UWC) —the two institutions where the South African principal investigators are based. BRICS Astronomy and AfAS have begun working together because of the similar synergies that exist with the two different groups, namely the fact that we are trying to establish collaboration through our different countries both within Africa and BRICS, but also identifying how we might foster human capacity development, education initiatives and enable wider societal benefits. Also how we might link to some relevant existing or future international projects.

How do you see the balance between the two organisations the AfAS and BRICS Astronomy?

There are well established astronomy groups in certain countries but traditionally the strengths in terms of astronomical research have been pretty well focused in South Africa and countries in North Africa. The South African Astronomical Observatory and South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) provides the major astronomy facility access in South Africa.

In North Africa, there has been a long established observatory in Egypt and also in Morocco, and Algeria but that’s pretty much it for most of Africa, notwithstanding the recent establishment of the Entoto Observatory within Ethiopia, and an older European telescope relocated in Burkina Faso. I think it’s fair to say that much of Africa is not yet as well advanced or developed in terms of astronomical research capacity or even astronomical education in many cases. There are certainly positive things that have happened. For example, some students who have trained in South Africa and attained their PhD degrees have now gone back to their own countries and started astronomy departments within their universities so there is now a growing community of astronomers but it’s still small number statistics and there is a big challenge ahead for AfAS to really assist in the development of astronomy on the continent.

What gave you the interest to go into Astronomy because it’s not a traditional area of study?

My interest in astronomy came from a general interest in science as a child, but one particular event that stands out was when I was seven years old. My father bought me a small telescope and that, coupled with one or two astronomy books that I had at that time really got my interest. Subsequently, during my school years, I just developed a love of science and by the time I had finished school I didn’t really know that you could even get a job as an astronomer. New Zealand is a very small place and has a very small number of astronomers.

So when I started as an undergraduate at the University of Canterbury in my home town, Christchurch, I originally planned to study chemistry. Well I started studying chemistry, but I also studied physics and it also happened that they had introduced a first year astronomy course. All of those subjects require mathematics,so I was also doing applied mathematics and in the end I did a double major, in physics and applied mathematics. . As I was coming to the end of my bachelor’s degree they introduced a Masters degree in astronomy. So I went on and did that, and following that I realised I really wanted to be an astronomer, so I applied for a scholarship in Australia at the Australian National University (ANU), in Canberra. I got accepted and completed my PhD before moving to South Africa in 1988.

What are some of the benefits that people take for granted and don’t understand but have their origins from the astronomy sector?

While astronomy research can be considered as “Blue Sky” or “curiosity driven pursuit”, it does have technological spin-offs. For example Wi-Fi. So everything that we have now in terms of Wi-Fi is a spinoff from that inventionby an Australian radio astronomer.

The World Wide Web was invented by a physicist at CERN. These are things which scientists don’t necessarily do because they want to see a society benefit necessarily, but it is a consequence of the fact that you can never predict the future benefits of something, particularly new technologies.

There are many technologies that have been leveraged by scientists who have been pushing new innovative instrumentation in astronomy. One of them is detection of light, having efficient detectors that can count photons (i.e. detect light) from a source in the cosmos and one of the drivers for the development of siliconbased CCD detectors has been astronomy. Not only just the hardware, but also some of the software aspects of looking for faint sources in a confusing background of images. An excellent example of spin-off benefits of astronomy was the connection between astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and people studying breast cancer at John Hopkins University where they developed computer programs to look at mammograms to identify early cancer cells using very similar algorithms and very similar computer programs that have been developed across the road at the Space Telescope Institute to look at the very faint objects with the Hubble Space Telescope.

How do you foresee the BRICS flagship program being funded in the near future?

To give you the optimistic viewpoint (and I suppose I’m more of an optimist than pessimist), the fact that South Africa has already put in a significant amount of funding for the next four years for the BRICS flagship program, in my opinion is very positive. We are in the process of bringing in at least three people who will be involved in driving our project forward. I’m very optimistic since in South Africa we already have a parallel project happening on linking our existing telescopes into an intelligent observatory, so that’s going ahead anyway.

Regarding the other BRICS countries, the people involved in the BRICS Intelligent Telescope and Data Network proposal, are basically covering all basic facilities in those countries. They are all definitely supportive of this program, however, what is uncertain is the time-scale for them to leverage new funding from their own science ministries and funding bodies within those countries. Some of them would seem to be closer to doing that than others so I think it will be something that will evolve over the next year or two. There’s been good support at what I would call the grass roots level with scientists, the people who want to do this.

This culminated in the meeting in 2019 in Rio where various programs had been put forward for flagships and the final decision was made to adopt the single flagship project. So from that point of view we have this large body of people in all countries involved who are definitely behind this and are talking to their science ministries to say this is the project that needs to be developed and supported financially.

It was very positive in 2020 when they basically ratified this to be the project to be supported. The bottom line is there is no single source of funding; there is not any money that’s going to come from, for example, the BRICS Bank. Therefore the support of the program will have to come from the individual countries and most likely through the normal grant processes.

I still have a worry that the program will be appropriately funded at a level expected for a “Flagship”, which may be challenging in the current economic environment. We developed this program with a budget of about 30 million Euros over a nine-year period and that’s basically what we aspire to raise going forward. It may sound a lot, but for five countries the annual commitment is, I believe, quite reasonable. The major cost is for the support of graduate students and early career astronomers within BRICS, something which would greatly enhance the human capacity development agenda for all BRICS countries—something strongly supported by the respective governments. So I’m quietly confident that we will succeed in the long run.

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