Africa is ready !

They say an organisation tends to reflect the culture and values of those who lead them. In the case of our SKA bid team and the fantastic leadership of the honourable minister of science and technology, Ms. Naledia Pandor, this certainly holds true.

Watching her in action at a press briefing to the South African National Editors Forum this morning, reminded me once again how blessed we are to have her involved. From a deft touch to lighten an awkward moment, to battle stations school mistress mode to correct a misconstrued statement, she reminds us time and again of how to run a campaign such as this with grace and dignity.

I apologise for gushing a little, but it really just lifts you up to be involved with a project and people of this calibre. When asked to discuss a potential plan B should the site decision swing against us, her emphatic response was that Plan A, B and C are all for the SKA to come to Africa.

The ongoing groundswell of support across Africa and the EU, the students from outside South Africa taking up bursary positions, antennas around the continent being pressed into action, science parks being built, schoolchildren chanting the name of MeerKAT, science pouring forth from KAT-7, world class researchers taking up chairs at our universities……

Hear the distant rumble. Africa awakes.

It is going to be one heck of a ride

One of the things that constantly amazes me about being involved in this project is the level of awareness and enthusiasm the general public shows towards our endeavours. This fact was brought home once again this week with a visit I paid to Crawford Prep in La Lucia just outside Durban.

I was contacted some time ago by Alison McKenna who very nicely asked if I could come and give them a talk sometime. She showed me some of the fantastic work they had been doing over the past 4 years towards educating the pupils about MeerKAT and the SKA. Given this I was prepared for a certain level of familiarity with the project.

Well… I was just blown away by the excitement and enthusiasm on display. Just entering the reception area and seeing the massive display chock full of MeerKAT facts and figures is enough to make you think that the job is already done.

Indeed, I began to feel like quite the rock star – walking through the school barefoot, being politely, but excitedly greeted by all whom we met. And then on to the obligatory photo shoot
Fortunately I had an excellent partner in crime, Savvas Tattari, a grade 7 pupil who was a camera natural in spite of having a broken thumb !

He later gave me a great vote of thanks – no mean feat when standing up in front of your whole school.

Given the school’s long interest in the project it was no surprise that some excellent questions were asked after my talk. It was the age of the questioners that was so remarkable. With non stop enthusiasm and some really probing questions, the grade 4 and 5 pupils really showed the way.

All in all a fantastic trip that was well worth the effort, and a special thanks to Alison for her great efforts in promoting and educating around the project.

Well it depends whose doing the asking. A cartographer may well argue the case, Carl Frederich Gauss would certainly rail against the description, and a mathematician would ask you to define ‘flat’.

An astronomer, on the other hand, would happily go along with this ‘simplification’ if it brought about an answer to an otherwise intractable problem. Simplification is a powerfull tool, that allows us to get a handle on otherwise intractable problems. The idea being that once solved for this simpler case, we can then redo the work with added realism later (usually left as an exercise to the reader ).

Germane to our current discussion is the simplification used in the earlier days of Radio Astronomy that assumed each antenna in the array was co-planar. This is where a flat earth would help out tremendously. Sadly, reality intervenes, and for any but the smallest arrays (or those built on cruel and unusual geography), antennas do not lie on the same plane, but rather tend to follow the natural lie of the ground they are built on.

In essence, correcting for this effect requires a large amount of computation that was simply unavailable in the past. Now that arrays have become more sensitive, and computing power has caught up, it is very important to address this effect. By way of long winded introduction, part of this problem is what I have been working on in Socorro, NM for the past week.

W Projection (proposed in this seminal paper by Tim Cornwell, Kumar Golap and Sanjay Bhatnagar), is a step in the imaging process that corrects for this effect by using a modified convolution function when gridding the radio data. (The data needs to put on a regular grid so we can use an FFT).

Anyway, I was working with Sanjay on moving the computing load for this process from the CPU and on to a GPU. The advantage of this is that since the GPU can calculate these functions many times faster, we can reduce the size of the computer needed for imaging, thus saving money, power and the planet

Here is the pretty picture demonstrating that things are basically working (still slight differences between the implementations, but these will be solved soon).

It’s great to be able to work with the best people on the field – astronomy really is a collective endeavor !

Aaah, good old New Mexico. Home to Roswell, Trinity, and of course the Very Large Array – newly upgraded to stronger, younger, faster ‘Expanded’ form…

Joking aside, the VLA is the grandaddy of radio telescopes. The most sensitive centimeter wavelength telescope in the world, even before the extensive upgrades that have brought the telescope bang up to date. In many ways MeerKAT will be similar to the VLA, and will possibly even wrest the sensitivity crown from its grasp

Of course, being in different hemispheres, makes for a very complementary competition, and we expect many joint observations with Southern coverage from MeerKAT and Northern coverage from the EVLA. Another advantage of this complementary nature is that we can potentially share a significant amount of software between the two instruments.

Whilst on the continent (you will recall the Canadian escapades of last week), it seemed a good opportunity to get together with the software team from the VLA, based in sunny Socorro, and get down to some problem solving. More on this in the next post…

But next time you find yourself in New Mexico (as one does), take the time out to visit the site, it really is most inspiring…

 

The movie buffs amongst you will recall that Contact, possibly the most well though out science fiction film of all time, had large parts shot on location at the VLA. So if you can’t make it in person, perhaps a repeat, or lucky you, first time viewing is in order !

Wednesday in Banff saw the day of the SKA Forum. The science was forgotten, the engineering was put on hold, and the political heavyweights from across the board rolled out. This was basically the final public platform for politicians and leaders from each of the bidding countries to make their cases.

Our minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, gave one of her trademark speeches. Full of familial touches, but backed by a stern reminder to the community that we need to make the site decision within the timescales previously given. In a deft response to a taped message from the New Zealand prime minister mentioning the Rugby World Cup, she reminded the audience that South Africa was the incumbent, but did play down our chances for this year…

After the ministerial speeches, the project directors had a go. Dr. Bernie Fanaroff gave a superb, measured talk that highlighted the massive amount of delivery from the South African team in all aspects of the project. It really made the crowd sit up and take notice !

During the day we also conducted live demonstrations of the KAT-7 telescope in operation in the Karoo. People really enjoyed seeing the distant site via webcam, along with several live data displays and a Skype session to the Cape Town office.

All in all, a fabulous day out for team Africa. I don’t think we could possibly have done any more. We also now have a firm deadline – February 2012 will see the announcement of the host site for the SKA… Watch this space !

The SKA 2011 meeting in Banff is broken up into three meetings, each of distinctly different cadence and character. The first two days have seen the calm before the storm, as the “Science in the Era of Massive Datasets” meeting got underway.
I must admit to some degree of scientific atrophy (the perils of being on the engineering side of the fence for to long), so it was great to get a swift reawakening from the range of excellent talks.

A particular highlight was Roger Deane’s talk on gravitational lensing. (Check the forum website in the coming days for copies of the talks – sure to stretch your mind !)

This fascinating science uses massive, relatively nearby clusters of galaxies as cosmic magnifying glasses to see much more distant objects that lie behind them.

And as a South African, currently studying at Oxford, but who is on his way home, this is great stuff indeed !

Tomorrow the fun begins…

So I stepped out of the door of my hotel room in Qatar, and into one in Banff, Canada. A slight matter of 53 hours separating these seemingly straightforward events ! Who said being a radio astronomer wasn’t glamorous

Anyway, here I am in Banff for the last of the big SKA meetings before the site decision is made in mid 2012. Already you can feel the buzz around the place, as the two contestants (ourselves and Australia), being to limber up for the big event. I will be posting a couple of times during the week, giving people of feel of the event, along with my (only slightly biased) take on how things are going.

In the meantime, I took the opportunity to go up a mountain. The climb was a touch strenuous, ascending 1000m in around 7km, but the panorama from the top was pretty awesome…

I started out in the valley below, and as you can see I was looking a bit rough by the top. (Although this is naturally excused by the insane trip to get here in the first place!)

Take a look at those temperatures, when the sea is 34 °C, you know you have some heat to deal with….

The setting was the World Congress of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar. This congress brought scientific journalists from around the globe, to discuss the particular challenges of communicating science to a general audience. As part of our ongoing efforts to bring the South Africa SKA bid to the world’s attention, we had an exhibit and hosted a number of speaking events.

The Minster of Science and Technology, Ms Naledi Pandor, and I, hosted a press conference during the event. During this event our minister was asked why our campaign to host the SKA has not been more forceful. The minister responded that she was not interested in playing ‘dirty’, and that South Africa state its case on the facts and campaign purely on merit.

Another very encouraging aspect of the conference was the large number of journalists from Africa and the Middle East. It was a great opportunity to bring this project to the attention of journalists who have a local interest in the matter.

Next up, Banff !

Wednesday the 18th of May saw municipal election day in South Africa. As befits the economic and political powerhouse of the continent, the elections went off without a hitch and have been declared free and fair by third party observers.

The hallmark of a healthy democracy is the tone of election day. The run up is fraught with battle and slander from all sides (as it is everywhere in the world). The key is to put aside the cudgels once the vote has been cast and accept the will of the people.

Turnout for the elections was also superb with 57.6% voter turnout (up from 48% in the previous election), showing that we posses an engaged and passionate electorate.

Showing once again how far we have come since 1994, it was another great day to be South African !