SKA
SKA
Taking Our Understanding of the
Universe to New Heights
PRODUCTION: Timothy Reeder
When completed, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the largest radio telescope ever built and capable of producing science that changes our understanding of the universe. It is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope across one million square metres of collecting area, with a wealth of the world’s finest scientists, engineers and policy makers bringing the project to fruition.
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The SKA telescope will be co-located in Africa and in Australia, and the sheer scale of the project marks a huge leap forward in both the research and development and engineering processes of building and delivering a radio telescope. The end result will deliver a fittingly transformational increase in science capability when operational, with the SKA set to offer an unprecedented scope in observations; it will exceed the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope by a factor of 50 times, and allow us to image huge areas of sky in parallel. A vast range of other similar large telescopes are due to be built and launched into space over the coming decades, meaning that the SKA will perfectly augment and complement these all while leading the way in scientific discovery. Deploying thousands of radio telescopes, in three unique configurations, it will
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enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky thousands of times faster than any system currently in existence. Thousands of SKA antenna dishes will be built in South Africa in the Karoo, with outstations in other parts of South Africa as well as in eight African partner countries. Lorenzo Raynard is Head of Communications and Stakeholder Relations for SKA SA, and talks in greater depth about the sheer magnitude of the technology underpinning the development: “In South Africa, SKA Phase 1 has entailed the building of the mid-frequency antennas, which will incorporate the MeerKAT radio telescope with its 64 antennas. An additional 150 antennas will be added to that. This represents approximately 10% of the entire SKA project, so we will be looking at somewhere in the region of 2500 antennas at the projects’ completion which will extend across the three
spiral arms spanning the African partner countries.” AVLBI In total, nine countries of the continent will form what is known as the African Very-Long-Baseline (VLBI) network. While the desert regions of South Africa provide the perfect quiet backdrop for the high and medium frequency arrays that will form a critical part of the SKA’s ground-breaking continent-wide telescope, it is not alone in hosting components for the SKA in Africa. Eight partner countries around the African continent will also have radio telescopes contributing to the network that will provide scientists with the world’s most advanced radio astronomy array. These include Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia. Raynard explains the significance of this network to the SKA project.
SKA
“AVLBI is essentially a group of antennas that are set up across a very long baseline that forms an interferometry - a long stretch of antennas that observes as a single unit. There are a number of these already in place, namely the European VLBI and the Merlin telescope, which was one of the first to be formed.” Interferometry is a type of astronomical interferometry used in radio astronomy whereby a signal from an astronomical radio source is collected at multiple radio telescopes on Earth. The African VLBI Network (AVN), meanwhile, will help to develop the skills, regulations and institutional capacity needed in SKA partner countries to optimise African participation in the array, and enable participation in developing SKA pathfinder technology and science. The AVN will help to develop the skills, regulations and institutional capacity required to optimise African participation in the SKA and in pathfinder technology development and science. GOVERNMENT PARTNERSHIPS A ministerial meeting in August this year brought together members of all nine of the SKA African partner countries, each represented by its respective Ministers and Deputy Ministers of Science and Technology. It was the fourth such occasion, with the purpose of considering progress in the development of human capital initiatives and the formulation of new academic programmes around physics and astronomy, as well as site selection and the rollout of high performance computing capabilities. “It was also at this meeting that all the ministers from the African partner countries agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU),” Raynard adds, “to establish their commitment in preparation of Phase 2 of the building of this VLBI.” As Raynard explains, for those present the benefits of establishing
the African VLBI were laid out for all to see. “The agreement in question was to do with the partner countries investing in radio astronomy,” he says. “If you are building a VLBI it is simply a case of buying up land in each country and then building the telescope. For this level of investment, however, it is important that each country buys in and, as a result, is able to use the instrument for their own human capital development. In this way, it will be able to build an expertise base not only in telescopy but also in the science of astronomy and cosmology and the related fields. “Somebody that is trained in astrophysics, for example, is essentially a data scientist and these skills can be applied to many other areas of the economy - such as banking or finance. “The other primary benefit
of establishing a VLBI is that infrastructure is being established across these African partner countries,” he goes on, “which will help to process the enormous volumes of data that are gleaned from these instruments. That data infrastructure can be made available for other natural science disciplines for conducting research, such as bioinformatics and genome research. The return on the investment in infrastructure is at a multi-lateral level.” The South African Minister of Science and Technology, the Honourable Grace Naledi Mandisa Pandor, is the Chairperson of the Interministerial Committee of the AVN, and added that, “a vital part of the effort towards building SKA on the African continent over the next decade is to develop the skills, regulations and
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institutional capacity needed in SKA partner countries to optimise African participation in the SKA.” Also recognised at the meeting was the progress made in the development of the AVN project, particularly with Ghana’s announcement that it had been the first of the eight partner countries of the AVN to complete the conversion of a communications antenna into a functioning radio telescope. The combination of what are termed ‘first light’ science observations included Methanol Maser detections, VLBI fringe testing and Pulsar observations. Reaching these three objectives confirm that the instrument can operate as a single dish radio telescope and also as part of global VLBI network observations, and Professor Kwabena FrimpongBoateng, the Ghana Minister of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), added: “The Ghanaian government warmly embraces the prospect of radio astronomy in the country and our radio astronomy development plan forms part of the broader Ghana Science, Technology and Innovation Development Plan.” The first light readings have been instrumental in highlighting the capabilities of the finished project, as Raynard explains. “Previously, there had been some trepidation from the African partner countries, with concerns as to exactly what the investment would entail, what benefits it would bring to each country and even whether there would actually be an SKA Phase 2. We noticed a real positive turn following the achievements of Ghana, in the senior officials and at the ministerial level, as people could see tangibly what benefits having a radio telescope in their country would bring, now that the instrument was in place.” Following these initial observations, the research teams from Ghana and South Africa will continue
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to carry out observations and analyse the data, to improve accuracy in experiments moving forward. MEERKAT PROVES ITS WORTH A precursor to the Square Kilometre Array is South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, currently being built in the Northern Cape. The MeerKAT telescope will be an array of 64 interlinked receptors, a term which refers to the complete antenna structure, with the main reflector, subreflector and all receivers, digitisers and other electronics installed. 48 of the receptors are concentrated in the core area which is approximately 1-km in diameter. The MeerKAT array has already spotted hundreds of new galaxies, and is on course to be completed next March. Of its 64 dishes, 43 have already been built. Once assembled, the first SKA prototype dish will link to this array and, over the course of the first phase of construction, to 130 more dishes just like it. MeerKAT proved its status as the best radio telescope of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere through its Array Release 1 (AR1), where 16 of the eventual 64 dishes were integrated into a working, fully functional telescope array. In a small patch of sky covering less than 0.01% of the entire celestial sphere, the MeerKAT First Light image identified more than 1300 galaxies in the distant Universe, compared to 70 known in this location prior to its development. “We have met all of our milestones on this project so far, and the next of these is to have all 64 antennas integrated by the end of March 2018,” Raynard tells us. “The launch will be soon after that, probably around June or July. As we speak today, all 64 antennas have been lifted, and now the hard work is ongoing to ensure that these are all connected and integrated, and make each of these individuals perform as one single telescope.
“We have continually met the goals that we have set ourselves throughout the timeline of this project to get us to this point today. The Array release 1 took place in April 2016, when we had 16 of the antennas integrated, which was followed earlier this year by our managing to get 32 antennas integrated from single polarisation. This keeps us well on track to meeting the ultimate 64 antenna milestone.” MeerKAT is funded by the South African Government and is a South African designed telescope, with 75% of its value sourced locally. MeerKAT also represents a sizeable international research and development investment for South Africa, and will be an integral part of SKA Phase 1. As these targets have been met and checked off, Raynard explains the visible progress that MeerKAT has been able to measure. “Every time we release an array, we point those antennas to a particular section of the sky and we are thus able to see how the resolution and clarity increase with the augmentation of the number of antennas and the baseline distance between those antennas. We have managed to show the public on each occasion how our observation of the same patch of sky keeps improving.” The MeerKAT telescope made its debut scientific contribution on an international collaboration and major discovery, as part of an international collaboration of telescopes to detect gravitational waves – ripples in space and time – for the first time, in addition to light from the spectacular collision of two neutron stars. The discovery was made using the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) alongside the Europe-based Virgo detector, together with some 70 observatories on the ground and in space observing the event at their representative wavelengths.
SKA
“This was the very first time that MeerKAT actually contributed as part of an international collaboration of instruments, and therefore contributed to a better understanding of the neutron star collision and the gravitational wave that resulted from that process,” clarifies Raynard. “Perhaps most exciting is the fact that, because MeerKAT will be integrated into SKA Phase 1, up until such time as this is built it will exist as the largest radio telescope of its kind in the world,” Raynard continues. “This will attract attention from across the world, which is the other benefit of investing in a large science infrastructure of this kind. Being able to attract that level of intelligentsia from across the globe means that our own talent can begin to be nurtured. This is a huge component of building a knowledge economy.”
PROTOTYPE BUILDING Attention now turns to construction of SKA Phase 1 itself, currently slated to begin in 2018 and integrate both the MeerKAT and Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) precursor telescopes. The SKA Organisation is moving towards finalising the detailed design of the SKA1 radio telescope which will culminate in Critical Design Reviews (CDR) for all the telescope products and associated infrastructure and power during the course of 2018. “Prototype construction has already started,” says Raynard, as the SKA begins to take shape as a real entity. “We have finished the process of building the very first prototype foundation and we are currently testing this. Because it is an innovation project, very few of the parts are bought from the shelf. All our next steps are based on the previous one,
which is where the importance of the precursor and pathfinder instruments are so valuable. These all form parts of understanding and optimising the design and understanding of SKA Phase 1, and, eventually, SKA Phase 2.” The SKA is a mega-science project, and is set to push the limits of engineering and scientific endeavour over the coming decades, as the development of cutting edge technology and innovation, including the design of the world’s fastest supercomputers, facilitates its construction.
SKA +27 (0)21 506 7300 enquiries@ska.ac.za www.ska.ac.za
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AFRICA
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE FOR AFRICA’S INDUSTRY LEADERS
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Issue No.65
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Journey of a
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Exclusive interview with CEO Andrew Darfoor ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
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