SKA Project - Nov 2019

S K A P R OJ E CT

© SKA

SKA PROJECT

SKA Precursor Continues to

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One of the great science advancements of our time, the SKA Project is an international effort to further our understanding of the universe. By bringing together the world’s best people and technology, and using South Africa as a base, this project will go down as one which changes the way humans research the skies. www.enterprise-africa.net / 3

INDUSTRY FOCUS: TECHNOLOGY

© SKA South Africa

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The SKA (Square Kilometre Array) Project continues to break boundaries for global science and local technology development. A major infrastructure mission which sees complex engineering underway across several countries, the SKA Project is advancing human understanding of the universe, but it remains in its infancy.

The project involves building the world’s largest radio telescope, with instruments spread across a million square metres, and the ability to look far into space to understand more about the depths of the universe. In its entirety, the telescope will be one of the most powerful scientific instruments ever created and will dwarf the ability of any current system – even the Hubble Space Telescope.

A combined effort between several member countries, the SKA Project is headquartered in the UK but feels its heartbeat in South Africa’s arid Karoo region, where electrical interference is low and human population is sparse.

Eventually, from here, the project will see many high and mid frequency dishes collect data from

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the sky and high-power computing technology, some of which is still yet to be invented, will combine with data collected from more low frequency dishes located across Western Australia’s Murchison Shire.

Enterprise Africa has tracked the progress of this science and technology mega project and followed as the first seven dishes wet down in the Karoo – the KAT-7 – through until the MeerKAT (the initial 64 antenna array) was inaugurated last year, as well as all of the infrastructure and electronic work in between.

Now, progress continues at a stellar pace with more countries getting involved, more governments realising the benefits of this major concept, more technology going down on the ground, and more discoveries justifying the large investments that have been made.

SA PROJECTS In May, it was announced that 38 South African-led projects would be granted access to the MeerKAT radio telescope.

Eight large international projects will take up two thirds of the telescope’s time and the remainder will be offered

up for ‘open time observation’. Within this bracket, studies ranging from research of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, to investigations of hydrogen gas, the fuel that makes up stars, half-way across the Universe have been given the ok. These studies will be carried out by a host of different groups including students, professors, and national research executives.

South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) Chief Scientist, Dr Fernando Camilo, commented on the success of the SKA Project when it comes to the development of a local science industry.

“We knew that the growing South African radio astronomy community was keen to use this magnificent telescope in novel ways,” he said, “and indeed we received many good proposals with clever ideas. While we expected postdocs to lead some proposals, we were surprised and very gratified to receive five proposals led by post-graduate students – including some of the very best! This bodes well for the future of South African radio astronomy.”

SARAO Managing Director, Dr Rob Adam was equally impressed

SKA PROJECT

with the appetite of the local science community. “A decade ago, such a call for South African-led projects would have resulted in a handful of proposals.

But while designing and building MeerKAT, in parallel we invested in the people, developing a human capital development programme closely tied to the science and engineering of MeerKAT and its associated technologies. This directly accounts for the success we see today, with this large number of young South Africans poised to use one of the world’s great research instruments.”

MOST POWERFUL COMPUTING Also in May, a group of computing experts, led by Cambridge University, offered up the engineering design work for the Science Data Processor (SDP), ready for the Critical Design Review (CDR). The SDP will be made up of two

super-computer components, one in Cape Town and one in Perth. The amount of data that the mid frequency telescope will collect is more than enough to fill 340,000 standard laptops, every day.

This requires a serious amount of power.

The design and engineering is vital and is helping to showcase excellence in South Africa by members of the SDP consortium, including the CSIR Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Dr Adam was delighted with progress, saying: “The unique requirements for the SDP have also driven our specialists to be creative and design unique technologies that allows SARAO to contribute to economic development and commercialisation in South Africa.”

Following from this important milestone, in July, the next hurdle

was overcome when the Assembly, Integration and Verification (AIV) Consortium of the SKA Radio Telescope completed its initial work. Vitally important, this work helps to ensure that telescope elements have been designed, tested, built, assembled, and verified. There is no room for redesign or reengineering after the project has gained momentum. Led by the SARAO, the AIV Consortium is responsible for quality control, and to date, its work has been successful.

“SKA-MID will consist of nearly 200 dishes in South Africa and 130,000 antennas in Western Australia, so we don’t want to assemble and integrate and then discover something crucial is missing, or doesn’t work as we expected it to,” said Richard Lord, AIV Consortium Lead at SARAO. “We’ve learned valuable lessons from MeerKAT about how challenging

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AIV can be if issues are identified too late during deployment. Planning for the AIV now gives us the best possible preparation for accurate procurement and construction for the SKA.” SARAO Chief Technologist, Justin Jonas agreed, saying: “The AIV programme is critical to ensure that telescope elements, that have been designed and built by a dispersed global community, are tested, assembled and verified in a rational and thorough way, thereby ensuring that the entire telescope system will work as designed, to budget and on schedule.”

Peter Hekman, Engineering Project Manager responsible for AIV at the SKA headquarters, praised the work and highlighted its importance moving construction forward. “This small consortium has moved mountains in terms of the amount of preparation done for both SKA telescopes I want to sincerely thank them for their efforts.

After System Critical Design Review their work will really begin to pay dividends, as we put these plans into action with the construction of the SKA.”

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PROVING ITS WORTH After its official inauguration in the presence of Deputy President David Mabuza in July 2018, the MeerKAT telescope has already proven its worth as a precursor to the SKA, collecting highly valuable data about a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. At the end of July 2019, the MeerKAT discovered missing gas in distant galaxies. A team of astronomers used the MeerKAT telescope to discover vast amount of hydrogen gas located in galaxies sitting 60 million lights years away from Earth. Research suggests that the location is a galaxy formed after the collision of two major galaxies more than two billion years ago. The new galaxy subsequently absorbed smaller satellite galaxies and led to confusion about why a nearby galaxy, NGC 1316 seemed to have so little hydrogen.

The MeerKAT was central in the finding as Paolo Serra of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) – Observatory of Cagliari, and lead author of the new study, explains: “We

// SKA-MID WILL CONSIST OF NEARLY 200 DISHES IN SOUTH AFRICA AND 130,000 ANTENNAS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA, SO WE DON’T WANT TO ASSEMBLE AND INTEGRATE AND THEN DISCOVER SOMETHING CRUCIAL IS MISSING // show new radio images obtained with MeerKAT, which reveal where all that hydrogen was hiding – it’s distributed in two long, faint, gaseous tails, stretching to a large distance from the galaxy. The tails were generated by tidal forces in

SKA PROJECT

© SKA South Africa

action during the merger. The amount of gas found is consistent with that expected based on merger theory, and on the fact that the smallest progenitor galaxy was alike the Milky Way. Thus, thanks to these observations all pieces of the puzzle are now in place, and we finally have a more precise and coherent understanding of the formation of this famous galaxy.”

Fernando Camilo added: “With this beautiful piece of work, Paolo and his colleagues, among whom are several young South Africans, have significantly advanced our knowledge of the formation and evolution of galaxies.

This provides a wonderful taste of what MeerKAT will do in years to come.”

BUBBLING WITH POTENTIAL September was a very important month for researchers using the MeerKAT, looking forward to partial use of the SKA telescope in mid 2020s. A team of international astronomers tuned the telescope towards the centre of the Milky Way and detected enormous balloon-like structures that tower hundreds of light-

years above and below the centre of our galaxy. The theory is that a major energy burst, which occurred around two million years ago, next to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy caused the immense bubbles, only detectable by the MeerKAT. The discovery was published in the journal, Nature.

“These enormous bubbles have until now been hidden by the glare of extremely bright radio emission from the centre of the galaxy,” said Fernando Camilo, a co-author on the paper. “Teasing out the bubbles from the background noise was a technical tour de force, only made possible by MeerKAT’s unique characteristics and ideal location. With this discovery, we’re witnessing in the Milky Way a novel manifestation of galaxy-scale outflows of matter and energy, ultimately governed by the central black hole.”

This type of science has previously been unachievable and demonstrates the huge steps forward that are being made possible by the MeerKAT and wider SKA project.

At the beginning of the project,

back in 1993, a concept was discussed that could answer the big questions in astronomy including how galaxies evolve, what is dark energy, how are black holes are stars formed, what generates giant magnetic, and was Einstein tight about gravity. After more than a quarter of a century of development, bringing together some of the world’s finest minds, even the early sceptics have to admit that the SKA Projects is already showing its worth to mankind.

In South Africa, the offshoots have been massively beneficial and, with more than a decade of work yet to come, the future looks extremely exciting.

WWW.SKA.AC.ZA

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How will SKA1 be bette than today's best radio Astronomers assess a telescope’s performance by looking at three factors - resolution, sensitivity, and survey speed. With its sheer size and large number of antennas, the SKA will provide a giant leap in all three compared to existing radio telescopes, enabling it to revolutionise our understanding of the Universe.

WITH THE SKA

WITH CURRENT RADIO TELESCOPES

LOFAR Netherlands

SKA1 LOW Australia

SKA1 LOW SKA1 MID

x1.2 x4

LOFAR NL

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RESOLUTION Thanks to its size, the SKA will see smaller details, making radio images less blurry, like reading glasses help distinguish smaller letters.

SKA1 LOW SKA1 MID

x x

SURVEY

Thanks to its sensitivi larger area of the sky be able to observe m given time and so m

As the

er telescopes?

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Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, USA

SKA1 MID

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world’s largest radio telescope. It will be built in two phases - SKA1 and SKA2 starting in 2018, with SKA1 representing a fraction of the full SKA. SKA1 will include two instruments - SKA1 MID and SKA1 LOW - observing the Universe at different frequencies.

WITH THE SKA

WITH CURRENT RADIO TELESCOPES

South Africa

x135 x60

LOFAR NL

JVLA

Y SPEED

ity and ability to see a at once, the SKA will more of the sky in a map the sky faster.

x8 SKA1 MID x5 SKA1 LOW

LOFAR NL

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SENSITIVITY Thanks to its many antennas, the SKA will see fainter details, like a long-exposure photograph at night reveals details the eye can't see.

e SKA isn't operational yet, we use an optical image of the Milky Way to illustrate the concepts of increased sensitivity and resolution.

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