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"It was truly a great event and, in some sense, represents the culmination of our efforts over the last seven years," Jasper Horrell from the SKA South Africa office in Cape Town summarised the team's attendance at the SKA Forum 2011 in Banff, Canada, held during the first week of July 2011. Read on |
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At the SKA Forum 2011 in Banff, the Founding Board of the SKA unveiled the process and timeline for selecting the site that will host the largest radio telescope array in the world. By the end of this year the SKA Site Advisory Committee will present their final reports to the SKA Board of Directors, which is due to make its final site decision in February 2012. Read on |
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"The panel unanimously concludes that the PDR has been successfully passed and congratulates the project teams." These were the findings of the panel of international experts who conducted the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for the 64-dish MeerKAT array during July 2011. Read on |
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The SKA South Africa project has awarded four significant contracts, to Electromagnetic Software and Systems, MMS, the CSIR and BAE Systems Dynamics (SA), for its KAT-7 and MeerKAT projects. Read on |
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After a very successful deployment, the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionisation or PAPER experiment is now a proud 64-antenna array. Collaborators from the US (National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Universities of Virginia, Berkeley and Pennsylvania) gathered in the Karoo to accomplish this feat within a mere three week timeframe. Read on |
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Intel Corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with South Africa's Department of Science and Technology and the MeerKAT engineering team. Intel has undertaken to supply to SKA SA, for a joint evaluation, cutting edge, high-performance computing technologies that will be required to capture, process and analyse the vast amounts of data that will be generated by the SKA and MeerKAT telescopes. Read on |
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On 8 August 2011, all seven dishes of the KAT-7 telescope had been successfully fitted with "cold" radio receivers. These receivers are cryogenically cooled to temperatures of about 70 Kelvin, or -203 Celsius. This significantly lowers the noise floor of the telescope system, which enables scientists to make observations with significantly better sensitivity, thereby "seeing" much fainter objects than would otherwise be possible.
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Commissioning of the KAT-7 telescope is going full steam ahead with seven cold receivers installed and working, the KAT-7 correlator operating in continuum, dual polarization mode and fringe stopping now implemented. Baseline solutions, pointing models and Tsys/gain performance for the new receivers are being determined and detailed beam maps are being obtained. Read on |
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A significant operational improvement for the KAT-7 telescope has been the switch-over to grid power supplied by ESKOM, the South African electrical utility company. A 100kVA UPS (uninterruptable power supply), linked to all seven dishes, was recently installed on site. Read on |
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A new set of server computers for KAT-7 were recently installed in the computing container at Losberg, while the project engineers also finished refactoring the "fringe finder" CAM (Control & Monitoring) software to be ready for KAT-7 and to support both the FF correlator and the KAT-7 correlator. Read on |
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The correlator is a fundamental element of the MeerKAT telescope. During a recent acceptance test procedure (ATP) process, MeerKAT engineers and scientists made sure that all specifications set for the correlator have been met to ensure high signal fidelity, before using the correlator for science observations. Read on |
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The SKA South Africa project office contracted Luma, a Johannesburg-based animation studio, to produce a realistic 3D animation of the MeerKAT telescope as it will appear on-site in the Karoo when it is completed in 2016. "Realism was key throughout the project and we were rendering close to 160 billion polygons per frame in order to preserve the accuracy and achieve the final look," says Paul Meyer, MD for Luma. Read on |
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SKA South Africa MSc bursary holder James Newling has been awarded a University of Cape Town Research Associateship for 2011 for his thesis, entitled "Novel Methods of Supernova Classification and Type Probability Estimation". His work builds on the previous research of his thesis supervisor and collaborators, towards a better understanding of dark energy through observing supernovae. Read on |
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"Africa is both the cradle of humankind and the continent of the future, and we are confident that we present an outstanding site and the best home for the SKA," stated South African Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor. She was speaking at a press conference at the World Congress of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar at the start of July 2011, giving them an insider's view of Africa's bid to host the Square Kilometre Array on the continent. Read on |
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"Revolutionary science in the continent of opportunity" was the title of a presentation by Dr Bernie Fanaroff at the South African High Commission in London on 16 June 2011 (as part of the celebration of Youth Day). A packed audience of scientists, journalists, policy-makers and diplomatic representatives heard about recent achievements in astronomy in South Africa. Read on |
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The Universe Awareness programme, with which the SA Astronomical Observatory is intimately involved, has been honoured with the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) award. Science Magazine introduced the SPORE award as a means to showcase the best educational resources that are available on the Internet and to bring them to a wider audience. Read on |
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In the third edition in SKA South Africa's popular comic series Hannah, the intrepid school reporter from Carnarvon in the Karoo, explores the involvement of our African partners in the SKA project. A real meerkat also features prominently, along with an adorable bat-eared fox - both animals found in the Karoo. All three editions are available for download. Read on |
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