Analysis… An astronomical success
Dr Bernie Fanaroff, director of the South Africa SKA project, discusses the exciting discoveries expected to come from the SKA and the benefits it is bringing to the local community.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a global effort to build the largest radio telescope ever seen on Earth which, when completed, will have a total collecting area of approximately one million square metres, a capacity that far exceeds the global internet traffic, and a central computer with the processing power of around 100 million PCs. A unique project set to push the boundaries of human engineering, data processing capability, and scientific endeavour, the SKA will play a key role in answering fundamental questions of science, including: what is the nature of dark energy and dark matter, what is the origin of cosmic magnetism, and is there life elsewhere in the Universe?
Headquartered at Jodrell Bank, UK, the SKA is a truly international effort, uniting world class scientists, engineers and policy makers from a core membership of ten countries: Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In 2012, two sites were selected for construction of the SKA: Australia’s Murchison region, which will play host to the low-frequency arrays, and the Northern Cape Province, South Africa, the site of the mid-frequency arrays.
Already host to the KAT7 telescope array, an important testing ground for the MeerKAT telescope array, a 64-dish system that will form a precursor to the full SKA telescope, South Africa has a long history of astronomical research, with the beginning of the 21st Century bearing witness to a renewal of Africa’s position as a centre of scientific excellence. Key to securing the country’s bid to co-host the SKA was Dr Bernie Fanaroff, director of the SKA South Africa project, who in September met with Portal at the ‘Workshop for the Review of the Africa-Europe Radio Astronomy Platform Framework Programme for Cooperation’, in Brussels.
Here, Fanaroff discusses the exciting scientific discoveries expected to come out of the SKA; the challenges in coping with the huge amounts of data such a construction will produce (enough raw data to every day fill 15 million 64GB iPods); and the benefits the SKA is bringing to the local South African community.
Dr Bernie Fanaroff
As the world’s largest radio telescope, what science will the SKA make possible that wouldn’t have previously been achievable?
The SKA will explore a number of very big questions, one of the most important of which is our understanding of the evolution of the Universe. It will investigate what drives this expansion and how, which will increase our understanding of dark energy and dark matter. The SKA will also enable very fundamental tests of Einstein’s theory of relativity via the use of pulsars and other mechanisms, but it’s
hard at this point to say what exactly the breakthroughs will be. We’ll certainly gain a better understanding of the expansion of the Universe and the formation of planets – a whole range of things. But most radio telescopes have become famous for the things that weren’t predicted, the serendipitous discoveries. The way the SKA is being designed lends itself to precisely that.
In what way does the telescope depart from the great scientific infrastructures before it?
It’s a leap forward in many ways. Firstly, the sensitivity of the telescope goes way beyond anything we’ve had before; the ability to make images and spectra goes way beyond what we’ve had before; the ability to time transient phenomena in the Universe, whether pulsars or bursts of radiation etc. is far better than anything we’ve had before. In the sense of more and better, it opens up entirely new avenues and covers a far greater wavelength spectrum.
Of course, the SKA will also generate huge amounts of data, exponentially more data than we’ve ever had before. That is challenging in many ways; it starts to open up a new way of doing science. There is so much information that first of all you have to consider how to deal with it in order to do the things that you plan and then how you deal with it in order to find those things that nobody had predicted.
Data science is a fundamental part of the project – how is the SKA working with its partners to overcome the challenges here?
The first phase of the SKA has been broken down into work packages, each of which is the focus of a consortium of institutions in different SKA member countries. A very large consortium is working on what’s called science data processing, which comes after the initial computing stage. There is a lot of work to be done on processing the huge amount of data coming through with minimum energy expenditure.
The question then becomes, what algorithms can you use to take the data that’s been processed up to a point, calibrate it, and make images from it? This is a new challenge: while we already know how to make images and calibrate data in fairly small fields of view, we are now looking at very large fields of view. We’re having to design new science in order to calibrate and see everything with great fidelity over the entire field of view. At the moment a very strong group in South Africa is working on what we call third-generation calibration, which is going well.
Then, of course, there’s the question of how you distribute data around the world and how you make it available. The quantities of data are so large that shipping them to laptops around the world is unfeasible, so where do you store the data, and how? How do you analyse the data, what do you send around, what don’t you send around, for how long do you store raw material, etc.? All of those questions need to be dealt with.
There are a lot of people working in this area, which is a big reason why so many governments are attracted to the SKA project. Big Data is, of course, the phrase of the moment. The UK, for instance, is investing heavily in the SKA partly because it wants to develop Big Data capacity, and so are a number of other countries. We are very enthusiastic about its possibilities, not just for astronomy but for social and economic development, too.
The SKA is a flagship programme for us in South Africa. It has had tremendous government support and is now receiving much support from our partners in Africa. Building on the back of that we have launched another flagship: Big Data Africa. Here, we are continuing with the work we’re doing for the SKA to develop wider competencies in data science and Big Data in general.
Some really interesting developments have also taken place. IBM has established a research lab in Johannesburg, which does a lot of work on machine learning, and the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) has been established as a partnership between three South African universities. The IDIA is doing some very exciting work around astronomy but is also beginning to explore further afield – areas of bioinformatics, for instance.
We are working alongside the IDIA and our Centre for High Performance Computing on what we call the African Research Cloud, for which we are working with partners in the Netherlands, France and the UK, among others. The SKA and the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network are our first focus, but once that infrastructure has been established and the necessary people trained to operate and maintain it, we can integrate it with the European research cloud. This will be a very powerful tool, not just for astronomers but for anybody working in research in Africa, and will result in much wider data science competency, going into business, into government, and into service delivery.
You were instrumental in securing South Africa as a host location of the SKA; how do you feel the local community is benefitting from its base there?
As South African Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor has said on several occasions that the SKA is by far the most high profile science project we have ever had, so it has certainly raised the profile of science, technology, and astronomy within South Africa, where it has become a very popular topic of conversation. Not everyone understands it in depth, but they all know about it. I have been quite surprised by the amount of young schoolchildren visiting me because they’ve heard about the SKA and want to enter into astronomy or engineering, particularly the number of young women, who are not traditionally involved in these fields.
There have been some interesting developments within South African industry, as well. The people who have made our radio receivers have done such an excellent job that our MeerKAT telescope will in effect work four times better than we’d specified for the same amount of money, which has been recognised internationally, and our universities have been greatly strengthened by the number of first class people, locally and internationally, who have come to work in South Africa. In many ways we have reversed the brain drain.
The rural area in which we are building is very impoverished. Out-migration has been taking place for a long time, and there’s an 85% unemployment rate in the surrounding towns, as well as a very high level of poverty and a low level of skills. Traditionally, there have been very few qualified maths and science teachers in that area, so we’ve been working with the local schools, helping them to teach maths, science and now languages, and we have provided the students with computer labs. We’ve
also given 40 bursaries to young people to be trained as technicians or artisans and we’ve employed quite a number of them, which has had a remarkable effect. For the first time in those towns there are now clear examples of what you can do if you do well at school.
It’s really important that we make these efforts because the SKA’s lifetime exceeds 50 years. You cannot exclude and antagonise the community of which you are a part.
Looking ahead to your retirement at the end of the year, what in particular are you most proud of during your time as director of the South Africa SKA project?
I’m very proud of the way the SKA is galvanising and exciting people and encouraging them into science and engineering. Over 200 people are now directly involved in the project, in addition to those in the universities and in industry, and they are a really spectacular team. They’re performing world class engineering and science, the likes of which people never expected us to be capable of.
We want to prove that South Africa can be a major player in science, in technology, in the global Big Data industry. If you have a vision, you must convince people of that vision, and then be extremely stubborn and focused on it – that’s the main lesson from me.
Dr Bernie Fanaroff
Director of the SKA South Africa Project
This article first appeared in issue 8 of Horizon 2020 Projects: Portal , which is now available here.
