Rhodes University has been awarded one of five prestigious research chairs made available to South African universities through the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) as part of South Africa’s commitment to strengthening cutting-edge science and engineering in South Africa. In particular the work of these research chairs will support South Africa’s bid to host the world’s most powerful radio telescope.
South Africa is competing against Australia to host the €1.5-billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The 80-dish MeerKAT telescope – a SKA precursor which will contribute to the development of the technology required for the SKA – is currently being constructed near the town of Carnarvon in the Northern Cape.
As one of the biggest science and engineering projects on the continent, the MeerKAT is attracting leading scientists and engineers to work in SA, which will have a major effect on SA's reputation as a destination for astronomy, physics and hi-tech engineering, as well as in attracting investments and partnerships.
The SKA will be a mega radio telescope, about 50 to 100 times more sensitive than the biggest existing radio telescope. The SKA will consist of approximately 3 000 dish-shaped antennae and other hybrid receiving technologies, with a core of about 2 000 antennas and outlying stations of 30 to 40 antennas each, spiralling out of the core. These remote stations will be scattered over a vast area extending out to 3 000km from the core in the Karoo. The combined collecting area of all these antennas will add up to about one square kilometre, or one million square metres.
Botswana, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya, Mozambique and various Indian Ocean Islands are amongst the countries to host remote stations of the SKA if it is built in Africa.
The final decision on the successful host country, made by several major international science funding agencies and their governments, is expected in 2012.
Collectively worth R240-million over a period of 15 years, the Chairs are subject to review every five years. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has additionally committed R140-million to a bursary programme – the SKA Youth in Science and Engineering – for study in astronomy, physics and engineering in fields related to the SKA and South Africa’s MeerKAT Radio Telescope.
“The South African SKA project’s Human Capital Development programme has a deliberate focus on capacity development, and this has been recognised internationally as unique and highly successful,” said the Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, when announcing the five Chairs at the opening of the SKA conference in Stellenbosch early in December 2009.
“Heads of astronomy departments and radio astronomy engineering facilities around the world have commented on the high quality of research being done by the postgraduate students and academic staff working with the MeerKAT team.”
Worth R3-million for 15 years, the Research Chair awarded to Rhodes will focus on Radio Astronomy Techniques and Technology and will build upon existing areas of expertise at Rhodes.
Rhodes University Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research & Development, Dr Peter Clayton, attributes the success of the SKA Chair proposal to the work of Professor Justin Jonas, Professor of Physics and Electronics, and Associate Director for Science and Engineering on the MeerKAT project team.
His responsibilities include ensuring that the MeerKAT telescope has the appropriate specifications and uses the most appropriate technologies to achieve its scientific goals, liaison with the international SKA scientific and engineering communities, and technical assistance with the establishment of the Karoo Radio Astronomy Observatory.
He was also Director of the Hartebeesthoek Radio Observatory (HartRAO) for a three-year period, has been a member of the SKA Science & Engineering Committee (SSEC) since 2002, and is currently on the Executive of this committee.
Rhodes’ research focus will be in the area of Radio Astronomy Instrumentation, specialising in Techniques (Algorithm Development, Software Development and Image Processing) and Technologies (reconfigurable computing, digital signal processing and high speed electronic support) needed to build the next-generation of radio astronomy telescopes, and to make possible the science that these telescopes will enable, also encompassing electronics, algorithms and computing for Radio Astronomy Data Processing.
The Rhodes Chair will further contribute towards increasing the number of science and technology students in the country. The outputs of this Chair, and the research group and collaborations which surround it will be in the form of: algorithms and techniques; and human capital trained to take the field forward in South Africa and internationally.
There is currently only a small group in the world involved in the development these techniques, and many of them are already collaboration partners of Rhodes University. With the help of this chair, Rhodes will be in a position to add significantly to the scarce resources (human and algorithmic) in this critical area.
Rhodes University already has institutional links with, amongst others:
• the University of Illinois Department of Astronomy and the Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Astronomical Processing (LEAP) (Dr Athol Kemball, who is also an alumnus and visiting professor of Rhodes University),
• Oxford University (Prof Steve Rawlings, Head of Astrophysics),
• ASTRON - the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (Prof Mike Garrett, General Director of ASTRON),
• the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (radio continuum mapping),
• the University of Hertfordshire’s Centre of Astrophysics in the UK (Dr Matthew Jarvis, Reader in Astrophysics and RCUK Academic Fellow), and
• the NRAO in the USA (National Radio Astronomy Observatory - www.nrao.edu).
These partnerships are necessary to South Africa’s success in the MeerKat and also the SKA project, hopefully to be awarded for development in South Africa.
A vital part of the research plan at Rhodes is a close engagement with the people in the KAT office in Cape Town, ensuring a direct relevance of the work at Rhodes to the SA SKA/MeerKAT effort, using them as research associates connected to the university to collaborate on research projects and assist with student supervision, and as contributors to the critical mass of activity around the chair.
In the short term, the Chair will make an essential contribution to the substantial precursor array for SKA (MeerKAT), and will assist in expanding, broadening, and diversifying the Astronomy community needed to build, utilize, and operate MeerKAT.
The relevance of the Rhodes research focus is that it meets key areas of need in the initial implementation and longer term use of the MeerKat and SKA projects, for achieving fundamental utilisation of the investment in these instruments, and for getting the most out of the data. Few of the imaging techniques, and data reduction techniques, needed for the MeerKAT and SKA currently exist, and developing them is a critical success factor of these very high budget Radio Telescopes.
Other universities that have received SKA Research Chairs include Cape Town, Western Cape, Stellenbosch and the Witwatersrand. These universities will focus on research in Extragalactic Multi-Wavelength Astronomy, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electromagnetic Systems and Electromagnetic Interference, and Radio Astronomy respectively.
Each of the successful universities will now begin the process of finding an internationally recognised and dynamic researcher to take up the position. The intention of this initiative is to strengthen and further build up a world-class and dynamic astronomy and instrumentation community in Southern Africa.
Picture Caption: C-BASS dish installed at MeerKAT support base
The South African SKA Project, together with the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory and Rhodes University is collaborating with Caltech, Oxford University and Manchester University on the C-BASS (C-Band All Sky Survey) project. Two antennas will be used in this experiment: one at the Owens Valley Observatory in California, and one 7.6 m antenna at the Klerefontein support base of the South African MeerKAT telescope. The C-BASS project is intended to undertake an all-sky, total power and linear polarisation measurement to obtain a precise map, in the C-Band, of the Stokes parameters of the Galaxy.