As construction of the world’s biggest and most sensitive radio telescope formally gets under way this week, local firm Power Adenco Joint Venture has won a R890m contract to provide key civil infrastructure for the SA leg of the project.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be between SA and Australia and aims to answer some of the biggest questions in astronomy, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter. The project has been decades in the making, and ceremonies were held on Monday in the remote reaches of Carnarvon in the Northern Cape and Murchison in Australia to mark the start of the first phase of construction, due to be completed in 2028 at a cost of €1.3bn.
The international project is co-ordinated by the SKA Organisation headquartered in the UK, which has awarded Power Adenco the contract to provide infrastructure for power, fibre and roads for the SA leg of the project. It is the biggest contract awarded by the SKAO to a SA firm to date, minister of higher education, science and innovation Blade Nzimande said. A condition of the award to Power Adenco is that it must provide opportunities to local subcontractors, he said.
SA has already constructed the 64-dish MeerKAT array in the Karoo and will add to it to create the 197 dish SKA-Mid telescope, which will detect radio frequencies between 350 megahertz and 15.4 gigahertz.
Centred on a site 90km from Carnarvon, SKA-Mid will radiate out in three spiral arms covering a vast distance in SA and partner African countries, with the two furthest antennae 150km apart. It will ultimately link up with the SKA-Low telescope in Australia which will detect frequencies between 50 and 350 megahertz. SKA-Low will be an array of more than 130,000 radio antennae resembling Christmas trees two metres tall.
“The start of construction is a key milestone that sends a signal that we are delivering the telescope we have been committed to for decades,” said SA Radio Astronomy Observatory scientist Adrian Tiplady, its deputy MD for strategy and partnerships.
“Some of the most important questions it is going to tackle is how the universe has evolved from the Big Bang all the way through to today, including the evolution of stars and galaxies. But big (science) facilities are often not famous for the reasons that they were built but for what was serendipitously discovered afterwards,” he said.
Nzimande said the SARAO would continue to invest in skills development for the SKA and would provide R80m a year for about 100 bursary recipients, including astronomers, technicians, engineers and data professionals. SARAO had provided 1,400 bursaries to date, and the number was expected to double over the next 15 years.
SA’s investment in the MeerKAT radio telescope had not only positioned SA as a site for cutting-edge astronomy but had also provided important socioeconomic benefits for the local community, he said. The installation of 110km of power lines, 80km of road and the construction of the complex foundations for MeerKat’s 64 dishes had created more than 8,700 direct and indirect jobs.
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