The economically impoverished Northern Cape Province could find itself on the receiving end of an injection of computer, communications and electronics expertise and heightened economic activity, should the country win the right to host a $1 billion international project.
SA is among the nations to have submitted a bid to host the world's largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
The SKA will have a receiving surface - consisting of many small antennas, divided into a core element and a periphery - of one million square metres, which is 100 times larger than the current biggest surface for such an instrument.
It will be an intercontinental system, with peripheral antennas up to 10 000km away, although signals received by the antennas will be combined to form a single big picture, capable of probing the secrets of the very early universe, around the time of the Big Bang.
The SKA steering committee has identified three sites in the Northern Cape as ideal locations for the SKA radio telescope, each with a diameter of 150km. The sites are in the Kalahari (north of Upington), in the Karoo (north of Carnarvon) and in Namaqualand (east of Springbok).
Stressing the reasons why the Northern Cape is ideal for the project, the steering committee cited the "radio quietness" of the area (minimum radio interference from cellphone networks), low population density and suitable topography.
According to the bid brief, the core element of the SKA must be in the centre of a 100km diameter radio interference-free region, because radio emissions from the early universe are in the range of only a few hundred megahertz, a frequency band now crowded on earth with TV and cellular telephone transmissions.
"This region in SA has become a premier destination for cutting-edge astronomy projects and the country clearly has the history, experience and expertise in constructing, hosting and cooperating in major astronomical and space science projects to make the SKA a success," says Dr Rob Adam, chairman of the SKA steering committee.
"SA already has the Southern African Large Telescope in the Northern Cape, the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, while Namibia has the High Energy Stereoscopic System gamma ray observatory, the largest of its kind in the world," says Dr Khotso Mokhele, president of the National Research Foundation, the lead agency in the SKA project.
"We see the location of global astronomy infrastructure in our region as a way of promoting high technology investment and ensuring that local scientists are able to participate in world-class science at limited cost."
SA is competing with Australia, China and the US to be the host nation, and a final decision is expected during 2005, although construction on the SKA will only begin in 2010.
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