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South Africa's SKA bid 'firmly on track'

10 November 2010

South Africa's bid to host one of the world's largest scientific instruments, the Square Kilometre Array, is firmly on track despite an adjustment to the government's space science budget, says Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor.

In his February Budget, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan allocated the space programme budget R574-million for 2009/10, R611.5-million for 2010/11, R659-million for 2011/12, and R113.6-million for 2012/13. However, adjusted estimates show a cut of R508.7-million, to R102.8-million, for 2010/11.

Pandor, responding to a Democratic Alliance MP's question in Parliament on Tuesday, said part of the 2010/11 budgeted expenditure had merely been shifted to 2012/13 to ensure that South Africa's SKA bid benefited from evolving developments relating to the telescope's design.

The adjustment, Pandor said, aimed to ensure that South Africa's SKA precursor telescope, known as the MeerKat, was as closely aligned to the design requirements of the full SKA as possible.

Precursor to the SKA

South Africa is building the Karoo Array Telescope, or MeerKAT, as part of its bid to host the €1.5-billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a radio imaging telescope massively bigger than any such instrument ever built.

Regardless of whether South Africa wins the SKA bid, however, the MeerKAT will be a powerful scientific instrument in its own right, comprising 80 dishes each 13.5 metres in diameter. It will be built in a radio astronomy reserve near Carnarvon in the Northern Cape, where it was due to be commissioned in 2013.

However, Bernie Fanaroff, the head of the country's SKA bid, told Business Day last week that commissioning of the MeerKAT had been put back one year, to late 2014, due to a redesign to align it better with the recently finalised SKA dish design.

Once construction of the MeerKAT began in earnest, Fanaroff told Business Day, the budgeted money would be spent at a much faster rate.

An engineering test bed of seven dishes, called the KAT-7, is already complete.

South Africa, allied with eight other African countries, is competing against Australia (allied with New Zealand) to host the SKA, an instrument 50-100 times more sensitive and 10 000 times faster than any radio imaging telescope yet built.

The international SKA consortium is due to announce the winning bid in 2012, with construction likely to start in 2014 and finish by about 2022.

SAinfo reporter and BuaNews