Managing Director of the National Society of Black Physicists, Dr Lawrence Norris
Chairman of the National Society of Black Physicists International Committee, Prof Charles McGruder
Members of the National Society of Black Physicists
Members of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists
Ladies and Gentleman – partners and friends of the African SKA project
It’s a great pleasure to be with you today.
I would like to express my appreciation to the Managing Director of the National Society of Black Physicists (NSBP), Dr Lawrence Norris, and the past president of the NSBP, Prof. Charles McGruder, for the gracious invitation to address your august organisations.
I would like first to acknowledge the ongoing assistance and excellent support we have received from the NSBP for the African SKA bid. It is gratifying to know that the black physicist community in the US is not just watching with interest the developments in Africa, but is actively engaging institutions and encouraging support for SKA.
Equally I acknowledge the support from the Hispanic physicist community of the United States.
Today I would like to provide an overview of the current status of the African SKA bid.
The SKA is an array of 3 000 12 or 15-meter telescopes spread over 3 000 km, connected by the world’s fastest internet (about 220 gigabytes per second) to the world’s fastest supercomputer, and costing in excess of an estimated $2 billion.
Also I will talk about the current status of Meerkat, our SKA precursor telescope.
MeerKAT will be a world-class astronomy facility in its own right when completed in 2016. It is being built in the Karoo in the Northern Cape province of South Africa near the proposed site for the African SKA. It will be comprised of 64, 13.5 metre offset-feed radio telescopes. South Africa is investing about $300 million in this project, a sum that includes the construction of MeerKAT and the associated astronomy human capital development programmes across Africa.
Another exciting associated project is the Africa Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (AVN) project.
The AVN will be able to act alone as a totally African telescope or in concert with other global VLBI networks. We are already in discussions with the Brazilians to expand this network to South America.
Each of these projects represents an opportunity in which our friends in the US can collaborate with South Africa.
SKA status and the African SKA project
Since the 2010 meeting of the International SKA Forum held in Assen, important progress has been made on the African bid led by South Africa.
In July last year, the African SKA project received political endorsement at the highest level. The Heads of State and Government of the African Union adopted a Declaration at its Assembly, expressing the African Union’s support for South Africa to lead the bid to locate the SKA in Africa.
This Declaration also committed Africa to participate in the global SKA project, putting at the disposal of the project the resources and talent of our continent.
The SKA is also recognised as a flagship project by the African Ministerial Council on Science and Technology.
South Africa’s own commitment to advancing the SKA project has been cemented in all spheres of our Government including at the provincial level.
We have chosen an exceptionally good site for the SKA in a remote region of South Africa, a region with very little economic activity. We have provided statutory protection for the site through the Geographic Astronomy Advantage Act. The Act covers existing activities and transmissions, not only new ones.
In this we are unique.
We have connected the site to the national power grid and to the national optical fibre backbone. The networks are scalable and some are now “SKA ready”. We are collaborating with our national Department of Energy, our Electricity Supply Commission and German and Chinese agencies to provide renewable energy to the MeerKAT and the SKA.
South African-USA collaboration or potential for collaboration
Many of you are aware of the progress made 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. Our progress has allowed us to plan to publish tenders for Meerkat at the end of this year.
The commissioning of the KAT-7 Array will be completed by the end of 2011.
KAT-7 is not only a test bed for MeerKAT. It is also a scientific instrument in its own right and is in demand for scientific work by African and international astronomers.
Five years before the MeerKAT Array goes online for science operations in 2016, we have already allocated 43 000 hours of observing time, including to consortia led by many internationally renowned astronomers.
Suffice it to say that 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.
There is already considerable US interest in MeerKAT. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) has signed a formal collaboration agreement with the South Africa SKA Project Office (SASPO) with the goal of developing radio astronomy projects of shared interest.
This collaboration includes work on software development, expansion of data processing capabilities and staff & student exchange. NRAO has applied for funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Three US-led projects for potential collaboration with South Africa are NANOGrav, C-BASS and PAPER, the details of which I am sure most of you here will be familiar.
South Africa is ready to discuss how our investment could best contribute to these projects.
African astronomy projects – MITRA and AVN
It is not only the MeerKAT preparations that are progressing apace. Africa is now ready to fill a major gap in the global VLBI network. Plans are far advanced, and we have also taken decisive steps to create an African VLBI Network (AVN) together with several partner countries in Africa.
The Mauritians also have an initiative to create a low frequency VLBI telescope called Multifrequency Interferometry Telescope for Radio Astronomy (MITRA); in Sanskrit ‘mitra’ means friendship. At present inexpensive aerials are being erected in Mauritius and Durban South Africa; Zambia is investigating building a station.
Other examples of African projects where American astronomers can assist, or are assisting, are the construction of a 1 metre optical telescope at Djaogari, Burkina Faso, 2 1 metre class optical telescopes and a research institute near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a 25 metre radio telescope near Nsukka, Nigeria and the conversion of a 30 metre telecommunications antenna for astronomy purposes in Ghana.
Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say there are a great many exciting astronomy projects in Africa where collaboration will be greatly appreciated.
African human capital
In addition to infrastructure, South Africa and Africa are also contributing that most precious of resources, people, to the global SKA effort.
The South African SKA Project Office alone has awarded close to 300 grants and scholarships. Students and scientists from several African countries have benefited from these grants through a dedicated programme which has already spent $22 million.
Many of these young scientists are pursuing training and research opportunities at international institutions but have announced that they will return to Africa to work on the MeerKAT and SKA.
Some of these African students, on returning to their home countries, have been instrumental in assisting their government institutions to establish new radio astronomy and related undergraduate courses. These are now offered at universities in Kenya, Mauritius, Madagascar, Mozambique, Botswana, Ghana and Zambia.
Earlier this year a special workshop in the Karoo brought together more than 50 scientists from all the Africa partner countries, with astronomers from this NSBP (USA) organisation and Europe, to specifically consider the training of future astronomers on the continent.
I am pleased that five new Research Chairs, dedicated to the African SKA project and established at leading South African universities, have been filled by eminent international astronomers and cosmologists. Each chair is funded for a period of 15 years.
The South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) is currently a R200 million-a-year initiative that supports 82 publicly funded research-chair professors and 10 others co-funded with business. That may sound like a small group of scientists, but South Africa is a small country with some 750,000 students and 23 universities, of which only five or six can be called research-intensive.
A half of the current research chairs work in the natural and agricultural sciences, while the other half work in the health sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, and engineering. The majority of research chairs are in basic research fields, but there are few in technology development and innovation. The majority of these research professors work at our six research-intensive universities.
In three years SARChi will be a R428 million-a-year initiative that supports 154 research chair professors. The primary aim of this initiative is to encourage leading scientists to take up posts at South African universities. It is a flagship project. There are many other opportunities for Americans to explore in our university or government science systems.
Our international science co-operation can be seen in the growth of the number of internally co-authored publications, particularly after 2004, and of citations, according to Science Watch. Papers coauthored with the United States rose from 1 700 papers to nearly 5 000 between 1994 and 2008. South Africa is strong (over the world average) in several fields, including Computer Science, Environment/ Ecology, Space Science, Immunology, and Clinical Medicine.
However, with the emergence of economic and political ties to the BRICS, science and technology cooperation with these countries will grow.
Indeed, while the number of co-publications between South African researchers and those in emerging economies in the South is still small, bibliometric analysis shows that the highest growth in the years 2004-8 occurred in cooperation with India, South Korea, China and Brazil.
However, we have a special responsibility to encourage the expansion of science in Africa.
Several leading international economists and consulting firms have over the past year heralded Africa’s impressive economic growth and the rich trade, investment and other cooperation opportunities offered by the continent.
The SKA is well-positioned to benefit from this renewed global interest in Africa. Already multinational companies are fostering ICT, energy and other research and innovation partnerships with the South African SKA Project Office. The SKA continues to inspire and amaze.
I wish to conclude by saying that South Africa stands ready to work closely with American astronomers in the field of African astronomy.
I again would like to thank you for this opportunity to speak hear today. South Africa is grateful for the continuing support of the NSBP for the African SKA bid and science development in Africa in general.
