Here's the latest update from “Our man in Cape Town,” Benne Holwerde, researcher at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and a member of a team building a new radio telescope called MeerKAT (Karoo Array Telescope):
At a recent conference in Groningen, The Netherlands, four instruments stood out as pathfinders for the future Square Kilometer Array (SKA). The SKA will be such an enormous undertaking — financially, politically, technically, and scientifically — that there are several smaller projects under way to learn how to do it. The SKA will be as expensive as the Hubble Space Telescope but much more complex technically.
Pathfinder projects explore the how’s and what’s of building a large telescope in the two sites under consideration for the SKA: the MeerKAT in South Africa’s Karoo Desert and the ASKAP in Western Australia. Meanwhile in the Northern Hemisphere, two other precursors are under way: the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and the Westerbork Radio Telescope in The Netherlands.
Both telescopes are being upgraded with the new type of instruments we expect to use on SKA. The VLA is getting more dishes and better receivers and will be known as the Extended VLA (EVLA). The Westerbork telescope will get APERture Tile In Focus (APERTIF), a type of radio-camera that can take pictures of large parts of the sky.
Scientifically, this progress is very exciting. These pathfinders play a crucial role in working out what science to exactly go for with SKA (and thus optimize its design for).
The MeerKAT and EVLA will be good for detailed observations. These telescopes are to be pointed at things of interest. ASKAP and APERTIF will survey the entire sky for the radio emission of hydrogen gas, the building material of stars and galaxies.
We can then look at what they find in high-resolution detail with the EVLA in the North and MeerKAT in the South. All these machines will be coming online in 2013-14.
Interesting times indeed.
Previous updates: