Vice-Chancellor of Stellenbosch University, Professor Botman
NRF and SKA Management
South African SKA Postdoctoral Fellows and Postgraduate Students
Ladies and Gentlemen
It’s my pleasure today to be part of this annual event together with visitors from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) African partner countries, Holland, Japan, France and United Kingdom.
South Africa may soon host the world's largest array of radio telescopes. The Square Kilometre Array will be 50-100 times more powerful than any current radio telescope. Later this month, nine countries are scheduled to commit preliminary funds to get the project off the ground. Then, in February 2012, South Africa or Australia will be chosen as the final site for the project.
The SKA holds out two big promises or opportunities.
One is pure scientific achievement. Because the array will be able to look back in time almost to the big bang itself, we can expect new data on how the first galaxies formed, dark matter and dark energy, the nature of gravity and the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
The other is the social and economic impact of such a mega science project. If South Africa is chosen to host SKA, we hope the project’s Euro2 billion price tag will benefit South Africa’s society and spark a new sense of scientific achievement across the whole of Africa.
In Africa, the commitment to the project has never been stronger.
Mauritius is working with South Africa on the construction of a low frequency radio telescope called MITRA. MITRA will have array stations in Durban and in Port Louis.
The University of Zambia is visiting Durban University of Technology this week to explore the expansion of the MITRA telescope to include Zambia.
Ghana has recently acquired a 30-metre antenna from Vodafone. This antenna will be converted into a radio telescope with the assistance of South Africa. Together with Nigeria, Ghana will be next to have large dish antenna that can participate in the African VLBI Network.
It gives me great pleasure to see our partners in Western Africa contributing towards growth of astronomy investment by African countries.
We are working with Brazil to develop a programme that will attract Portuguese-speaking students from any African country to study astronomy at MSc and PhD level in Brazil. We expect the selection process to be completed in the next few months. It is partnerships like these that demonstrate the ability of South Africa to foster south-south partnerships.
We have made progress with the MeerKAT, the South African SKA precursor.
Over the past year all important milestones related to MeerKAT have been achieved, many of them ahead of schedule.
So well have we done that the major telescope and infrastructure tenders for MeerKAT will be published at the end of this year.
Already today - five years before the MeerKAT Array goes online for science operations in 2016 – 43,000 hours of observing hours have been allocated, including to consortia led by many internationally renowned astronomers.
South Africa is committed to providing the world with the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere - until the SKA is completed.
In addition to infrastructure, South Africa and Africa are also contributing that most precious of resources, people, to the global SKA effort.
Boosting the training and education of scientists and technicians, for radio astronomy specifically, but science and engineering more generally, has always been a critical driver for South Africa’s SKA investment.
The South African SKA Project Office alone has awarded close to 300 grants and scholarships. Students and scientists from several African countries have benefitted from these grants under a dedicated programme worth 15 million Euros. Many of you are pursuing training and research opportunities at international institutions.
This is important to highlight, since South Africa’s investment is not only boosting the African talent pool but also contributes to enriching the global scientific expertise available for radio astronomy.
Policy-makers, scientists, civil society advocates, and other experts often refer to the need for global scientific cooperation to address the many shared global challenges, such as climate change, energy security or pandemic disease, confronting our plant.
Yet we will only be successful if we are able to draw on the collective resources and capacities of our planet in a fully inclusive manner.
Global scientific endeavour requires the contributions of all regions, especially those like the developing world excluded in the past.
We are proud that the SKA project is well positioned to play a pathfinder role for a new generation of global-science partnerships.
With its strong current footprint of initiatives on the continent, the SKA will play a dynamic role in harnessing Africa’s science and technology capacities to contribute to global growth and development.
We have every reason to be confident in the prospects for the SKA project.
There are many unique and wonderful opportunities ahead.
South Africa and Africa are ready to play their parts in exploiting them as part of a global partnership for the benefit of all.
I expect to see exceptional papers from the Masters and Doctorate students of the South African SKA Programme. I expect nothing less.
I will be asking the South African SKA Project Office to keep me and my department updated on how well you are doing.
Annual events like this cultivate a culture of knowledge sharing. I hope this inter-university interaction happens more than once a year. It should be a continuous process where you as a community of students interact with your counterparts across the country and throughout the world.
It’s a pleasure to see such a diverse community of students working on expanding the body of knowledge about astronomy. It’s my hope that you also find time to motivate undergraduates and high school learners as part of your contribution to making astronomy less of an enigma and more of an exciting and attractive field of study.
To all the postgraduates students who are here today, I hope you take advantage of the opportunity to interact with leading astronomers from Leiden Observatory, Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Jodrell Bank, Observatory of Cote d' Azur, University of Herfordshire, Mizusawa VERA Observatory and University of Mauritius.
All the best with the 2011 conference.
Remarks by the Minister Naledi Pandor MP, at the SKA bursary Annual Conference, Stellenbosch
