Ladies and gentlemen
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this morning.
What brings CASPER together is astronomy, a science in which South Africa is one of the world's leaders.
It's well known that South Africa ranks with the world leaders in deep level mining engineering, in palaeo-anthropology and many other disciplines in the archaeology stable, in biosciences, nanosciences, alternative energy research and others, but it is not so well known that we are up there with the world’s best in astronomy?
South Africa has a long history in general astronomy.
It's nearly two centuries since the British Admiralty built an observatory at the Cape of Good Hope in October 1820, an observatory that stands today as the headquarters of the South African Astronomical Observatory, at the centre of a suburb here in Cape Town named Observatory.
From that time South Africa has occupied a proud place at the forefront of astronomical endeavour, and names like John Hershel, Thomas Maclear and Robert Innes, to name a few, have illuminated this field of science.
Today, our aim in the Science and Technology is to provide South Africans with the skills to solve the social and economic challenges facing our country. Our government has identified a number of key focus areas to nurture this aim, including the Centre for High Performance Computing.
However, our most enthusiastic involvement lies in our efforts to demonstrate that South Africa is by far the best site for the Square Kilometre Array Radio Telescope. We believe that both by way of history and circumstance we are ideally placed to host this remarkable instrument.
Like the relatively recent Southern African Large Telescope, the proposed core for the SKA will be in the Karoo region, which ranks as the world's quietest place, seismically speaking, quite apart from being remote and offering a complete absence of ambient light. Amongst its many other advantages is the fact that it on much the same timeline as Europe. For these, and many other reasons, we would like to be chosen as the site for the SKA.
SKA is important for South Africa.
SKA provides challenging engineering and scientific goals that will incentivise our most gifted engineers and scientists. SKA will also provide motivation for our able and competent young people. They will recognise that there is no challenge so great that it cannot be overcome by diligence, focus and hard work.
SKA will enable many people to acquire the type of skills and knowledge that will allow us to address challenges facing our nation on a wider front. Because we are so enthusiastic about the SKA, and because it means so much to us, we initiated a project to construct the largest radio astronomy instrument in the Southern Hemisphere; the MeerKAT.
This is also the name of an engaging small mammal and member of the mongoose family, found largely in the Kalahari Desert. When we add the prefix of the Afrikaans language word "meer" meaning "more" to the words "Karoo Array Telescope", we arrive at the name MeerKAT to describe an array of 80 x 12 metre dishes, appropriately located in the remote regions of the Northern Cape.
I don't have to tell you that the design, development, manufacture and deployment of Radio Telescopes represents huge technical challenges to even those nations experienced in the development of such instruments. Four years ago, South Africa assembled a team of engineers and scientists with the huge task of developing this MeerKAT telescope.
Not the least of the technical challenges they faced in this enterprise was the development of the technology required to convert the radio waves captured by the dishes into signals that can be understood by scientists. With limited experience; but enthusiasm and a great hunger to learn, they embraced the open radio astronomy community, and they embraced us, showing an enormous willingness to collaborate with us and help us gain the experience we need.
CASPER is the product of such collaboration. It has provided the opportunity for our scientist and engineers to quickly develop the skills required to develop the technology for MeerKAT and for our SKA efforts. And I believe that we have shown our wonderful international partners in this work that we have the capabilities not only to learn quickly, but also to contribute, innovate and lead.
The second generation CASPER tools were developed by our engineers as equal partners with the University of California at Berkeley, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the United States of America (USA), and Caltech; and is now used in a number of radio astronomy institutes across the globe, including Berkeley, Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), MIT Haystack; at Oxford and Manchester; in Italy, France, India and other countries; and of course by MeerKAT itself.
This technology will form the basis of a number of next generation Radio Astronomy instruments including SKA pathfinders. I'm told that this CASPER workshop 2009 is the first CASPER workshop to be held outside the University of California at Berkeley.
It is gratifying that we seem to have come such a long way in a short time, since it is only two years since the first CASPER Workshop in 2007, where South African engineers listened attentively and learnt from the wealth of experience and knowledge so graciously made available to them.
Now South Africa's MeerKAT engineers will help train people new to this technology and they will proudly contribute and participate as equal partners in this exciting and important collaboration that will form the basis of a number of next generation Radio Astronomy instruments and if all goes well, the SKA itself.
We are proud to host the CASPER Workshop 2009 and provide an opportunity for our top engineers and scientists to interact with top scientist and engineers in the international community.
We are proud to meet again with many of our mentors, to renew friendships and to revitalise our ongoing collaborations. The CASPER collaboration has been a great success. It is a story of the benefits of working together, both for ourselves and, I believe, our international partners. It is a demonstration for all to see that by working together we can achieve remarkable progress. As a nation we are committed to growing these collaborations and we will continue to support them in the future.
In closing, we have put over R2 billion into MeerKAT, the SKA site bid and the SKA HCD programme. We are as committed to the development of radio astronomy in Africa as we are to science and technology in general. We understand the importance of challenging goals, and as a nation we face many of them.
The CASPER collaboration is a real success story, and I'm confident that with your combined help it will have a far-reaching impact.
I wish you well, and I thank you.
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
28 September 2009
Source: Department of Science and Technology (http://www.dst.gov.za/)
