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The candidate SKA site in South Africa has the double advantage of being both remote and accessible for scientists and engineers. The Karoo site is scientifically excellent and very accessible to the world-class academic centres of Stellenbosch, Grahamstown and Cape Town. Its geographic location relative to Europe is another significant advantage. Telescopes in the Karoo can see the same sky as their counterparts in Europe. This makes it ideal for very long baseline interferometry. Read on |
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South African infrastructure means first SKA phase is well underway. The response to MeerKAT by the international radio astronomy community is a signal of approval for South Africa's ability to host the biggest and most important science facilities. Read on |
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South Africa's proposed site for the SKA has been confirmed as one of the quietest places on Earth. Recent measurements of radio frequency interference, conducted by the international SKA consortium, confirmed the site's extremely low occurrence of radio frequency interference. Read on |
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The Karoo doesn't just have the radio silence required to host the world's most ambitious radio astronomy telescope. It also has the infrastructure to power the SKA, analyse and deliver the data, support its scientists and enable world-class science at the lowest cost. Read on |
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Further evidence of the Karoo's suitability for next-generation radio astronomy comes from the successful deployment of the PAPER project on the South African site selected as a candidate for the SKA. PAPER - the Precision Array to Probe the Epoch of Re-ionization - is a radio interferometer, a system of radio telescopes linked to create one larger telescope. Read on |
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The proposed SKA site in South Africa's Karoo desert is demonstrating its next-generation radio astronomy credentials as the location for the southern hemisphere component of the multinational C-BASS project. C-BASS is the C-Band All Sky Survey, which will map the polarisation of galactic radio emissions from the Milky Way. Read on |
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African electronic engineers from the MeerKAT and SKA projects are at the forefront of digital signal processing which drives the next generation of radio telescopes.
The innovative ROACH board is an electronic building block which increases computing capacity while reducing costs, making it ubiquitous in new astronomy instrumentation.
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Some of the world's most distinguished radio astronomers and cosmologists have taken up key academic posts dedicated to the African SKA project.
Four of the five new university SKA research chairs have been filled with professors from the UK, South Africa, Italy and Canada. Read on |
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The overwhelming response by researchers to MeerKAT has demonstrated South Africa's capacity to host and support world-class astronomy projects. "We knew that if we built it they would come," said Prof Justin Jonas, the SKA Africa associate director for science and engineering. "And five years before MeerKAT is finished we have already allocated 43 000 hours of observing time."
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The South African SKA Project has awarded 293 grants and scholarships since its human capital development programme was started in 2005, substantially boosting Africa's capacity to design, build, operate and upgrade astronomy facilities, to carry out astronomy and instrumentation research and to participate in the SKA. Read on |
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African and global collaboration in the training of future astronomers on the continent was the focus of a three-day workshop, held during May 2011 at South Africa's proposed SKA site in the country's Northern Cape Province. Having the workshop in the Karoo gave participants the opportunity to see the KAT-7 array and other scientific experiments that have already been installed in the area. Read on |
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An African radio telescope network would fill in a major gap in the global VLBI network and that is what South Africa and its SKA partner countries are working towards. Such a network will also boost engineering and science skills development across the continent. Read on |
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