SOUTH AFRICA: Case built for mega-telescope contract

Driving the dirt road to the Karoo Array Telescope site, the FM radio searches in vain for a frequency it can catch, scanning the dial bottom to top and back again, writes Joshua Howat Berger for AFP. This very quiet corner of South Africa's sparsely populated Northern Cape province seems an unlikely place to build such an instrument, but its silence is precisely what makes the Karoo an attractive site for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project.

Scientists hope the SKA, a massive new radio telescope linking 3,000 antenna dishes, will shed new light on fundamental questions about the universe, including how it began, why it's expanding and whether it contains life beyond our planet. To do that, the SKA will need a quiet radio spectrum, clear skies, high altitude and low seismic activity.

South Africa is competing with Australia to win the contract for the SKA, a multi-billion dollar instrument that will be 50 times more sensitive than today's most powerful radio telescopes. South Africa has built seven antenna dishes and recently linked two of them together, the first time a multi-receptor radio telescope has been tested, according to officials - and the country believes the test puts South Africa ahead of Australia in the race.
Full report on The Telegraph site