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South Africa is one of nine countries that have signed a letter of intent to see the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) built - a move that has been welcomed by Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor. The letter was signed on 2 April 2011 at a meeting of SKA stakeholders in Rome, Italy. The signatories agreed to work together to secure funding for the next phase of the project. Read on |
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"Africa's SKA bid has support throughout the continent," said South Africa's deputy minister for science and technology, Mr Derek Hanekom in his opening address at the second meeting of MEARIM (Middle East and African Regional Meeting of the International Astronomical Union - IAU). He congratulated the IAU for providing this platform that has created a vibrant and growing community of astronomers. Read on |
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South African astronomers and their colleagues in other African countries are investigating the conversion of decommissioned telecommunications antennae across the African continent into a radio astronomy VLBI network. An African radio telescope network would fill in a major gap in the global VLBI network. Read on |
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South Africa will assist Mozambique with the construction of a new radio telescope adjacent to the country's Maluana Science and Technology Park over the next year. The radio telescope will boost postgraduate research and teaching programmes in radio astronomy at Eduardo Mondlane University and Mozambique's other universities. Read on |
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The principal investigators of the MeerKAT Large Survey projects assembled in Cape Town on 17 & 18 April 2011 for their first meeting with the project staff. The meeting was preceded by telephonic preparatory meetings with the project system engineers. Read on |
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The first meeting of the ThunderKAT project was held in South Africa from 19-21 April 2011. ThunderKAT is the MeerKAT Large Survey Project on transient radio (synchrotron) emission associated with accretion and explosive events. The workshop centred around discussions for developing software towards real-time transient detections in the image plane with MeerKAT and KAT-7, and the involvement of ThunderKAT in early commissioning science with KAT-7. Read on |
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A new Global Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD), that will function under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), was launched at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Cape Town on 16 April 2011. This office will be the nerve centre of a partnership between the IAU and South Africa's National Research Foundation. Read on |
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Four of the five SKA SA Research Chairs allocated to South African Universities have now been filled by leading international researchers. "We are very excited that South Africa's MeerKAT telescope is generating significant interest in the international community, and is attracting high calibre researchers to the country," says Kim de Boer, manager of the SKA South Africa Human Capacity Building Programme. Read on |
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The Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Re-ionisation (PAPER) project at South Africa's Karoo astronomy site will soon consist of 64 antennae. A further 26 antennae - being shipped from West Virginia - will arrive at Cape Town harbour during the first week of June 2011 and will then be deployed on site. Commissioning of the 64-antenna array is tentatively scheduled for the end of June. Read on |
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The new control room at the Cape Town MeerKAT project office is fitted with a live web cam link to the KAT-7 telescope site in the Karoo, as well as a real-time virtual sky display, based on the popular open source Stellarium software. This provides telescope operators with a synthesised view of the Karoo sky that includes radio and optical sources, satellites and the antenna pointing positions. Read on |
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Prof Howard Reader, head of the EMC and Metrology research team, Stellenbosch University, spent the last six months of 2010 as a visiting researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Here, he collaborated with Prof Paul Alexander, head of the astrophysics group, Dr Andrew Faulkner, the SKA phase 1 systems engineer and post-doctoral fellows Dr Eloy de Lera Acedo and Dr Nima Razavi-Ghods. Read on |
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The 4th IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics (ICWIP), held in Stellenbosch from 5-8 April 2011, was attended by more than 230 delegates from about 50 countries. In addition to a full scientific programme, the conference devoted time to debating ways of attracting girls into physics as well as recruiting and retaining women physicists. Read on |
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The barefoot astronomer blog is "a story of science, engineering and a continent called Africa," says Simon Ratcliffe. He is one of a team of engineers who are developing the software that will process and store the vast amounts of data from the MeerKAT telescope. Simon finds radio astronomy appealing because of the way it marries pure science with engineering challenges.
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