SA on track with Meerkat telescope

SOUTH AFRICA would meet its deadline of completing the Meerkat radio telescope project – a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – by 2017, Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor said yesterday.

“Our Meerkat will have 64 antennae and will increase from four dishes to 32 in the 2015/16 financial year and we will have completed the Meerkat by 2017,” Pandor said during a media briefing ahead of her budget vote in Parliament.

The Meerkat is being built in the Karoo, 90km outside of the Northern Cape town of Carnarvon.

The Meerkat, with a further 190 antennas to be built on the same site, will make up the first phase of the midfrequency component of the SKA.

The second phase of the SKA will see further midfrequency antennas constructed across South Africa and in eight African SKA partner countries.

“We’re very close to com- pleting the observatory dish that we’ve put up in… Ghana and we are almost at a point of switch on,” Pandor said.

“We think by mid-July we should be ready for it to begin to support researchers to do science.”

South Africa is co-hosting the SKA with Australia.

The SKA would eventually become the world’s largest radio telescope and, according to scientists, was expected to map the history of the universe and answer some of its mysteries. – ANA