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SKA construction to meet deadlines

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 02 Mar 2015
The second MeerKat antenna was unveiled this weekend.
The second MeerKat antenna was unveiled this weekend.

The second of 64 MeerKat antennas was unveiled by deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa this weekend, when he visited the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) site in the Northern Cape.

The South African MeerKat radio telescope is a precursor to the SKA telescope, which hopes to probe previously unexplored parts of the universe, and will be integrated into the SKA during the first phase of construction.

Science and technology minister Naledi Pandor vowed the SKA project will meet its deadlines. "By the end of 2016, they will have 64 dishes of the MeerKat ready for commissioning and by 2017 the telescope will be ready to do science."

Construction on the SKA will then start, be partly operational by 2020, and complete in 2025.

Last week, finance minister Nhlanhla Nene announced government has allocated R2.1 billion to be spent on SKA over the next three years, down R21.8 million from the original medium-term budget. This is due to contractual delays and delays in the testing phase; however, scientists have said this will not affect construction deadlines.

While the first phase of the SKA will be situated in South Africa and Australia, there are 11 countries that participate as members of the SKA Organisation. Around 100 organisations from about 20 countries have been participating in the design and development of the SKA.

"It is particularly significant that eight other African countries will be involved in hosting the second phase of the project. This promises to establish Africa as a hub for expanding scientific inquiry," said Ramaphosa.

He added it is anticipated the project will lead to new innovation in manufacturing and construction as producing thousands of dishes, "will demand an entirely new way of building highly sophisticated and sensitive scientific instruments".

The SKA will also collect and process vast amounts of data, which will require significant advances in high-performance computing.

Due to the broader benefits of the SKA project, government has identified the construction of the SKA as a strategic infrastructure project overseen by the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Committee.

"The SKA forms part of efforts to transform South Africa's economy through human capital development, innovation, value addition, industrialisation and entrepreneurship. It will create jobs not only during the next decade or so of construction, but also for the next 50 years of operation and maintenance," said Ramaphosa.

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