THE AD ...
[Recording of Vela pulsar in the background, fades away ...]
You are listening to the radio beams from a collapsed star, called a pulsar. This one is about a thousand light years away from earth -- 66 million times further away than the sun!
Just like you tune to your favourite radio station, astronomers tune their telescopes to listen to signals from pulsars, quasars, masers and other mysterious objects in the universe. They study the birth and death of stars and the violent lives of galaxies.
Over the next three years South Africa will be building a world-class radio telescope near Carnavon in the Northern Cape. The KAT -- or Karoo Array Telescope - will have twenty dishes, each fifteen metres wide.
But this is just a lead-in to the world's biggest radio telescope ever - the SKA, or Square Kilometre Array, that will have thousands of dishes.
Astronomers and engineers around the world are working together on this mega-telescope that will be sensitive enough to trace the origins of the universe and search for extra-terrestrial life.
South Africa is in the race to get the SKA built here, also in the Northern Cape.
The Department of Science and Technology supports the SKA project and celebrates October as Astronomy Month.
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During October, Astronomy Month in South Africa, a radio advertisement on the basics of radio astronomy and the SKA and KAT projects was produced and broadcast in four languages. The advertisement was broadcast six or more times on each of the following radio stations: Radio 702 (English), Ukhozi FM (Zulu), Motsweding FM (Setswana) and RSG (Afrikaans).
Funding for this radio campaign came from the Department of Science and Technology and the grant was administered by the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement. The radio campaign was conceptualised and implemented by a local science communication agency, Southern Science.
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