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Simon Ratcliffe is a South African astronomer known for his promotion of the Square Kilometre Array project. The media have dubbed him the "barefoot astronomer" for his habit of working without shoes. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The first detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was in 1932, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories observed radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observations have identified a number of different sources of radio emission. These include stars and galaxies, as well as entirely new classes of objects, such as radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, and masers. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, regarded as evidence for the Big Bang theory, was made through radio astronomy.
Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, hosts a number of radio telescopes as part of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. The observatory was established in 1945 by Bernard Lovell, a radio astronomer at the university, to investigate cosmic rays after his work on radar in the Second World War. It has since played an important role in the research of meteoroids, quasars, pulsars, masers and gravitational lenses, and was heavily involved with the tracking of space probes at the start of the Space Age.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an intergovernmental radio telescope project being planned to be built in Australia and South Africa. Conceived in the 1990s, and further developed and designed by the late-2010s, when completed it will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre sometime in the 2020s. It will operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size will make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument. It will require very high performance central computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the global Internet traffic as of 2013. If built as planned, it should be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than before.
The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) is a radio telescope operating at 843 MHz. It is operated by the School of Physics of the University of Sydney. The telescope is located in Hoskinstown, near the Molonglo River and Canberra, and was constructed by modification of the East-West arm of the former Molonglo Cross Telescope, a larger version of the Mills Cross Telescope.
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), formerly known as the One Hectare Telescope (1hT), is a radio telescope array dedicated to astronomical observations and a simultaneous search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The array is situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Shasta County, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California.
South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) is the national centre for optical and infrared astronomy in South Africa. It was established in 1972. The observatory is run by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. The facility's function is to conduct research in astronomy and astrophysics. The primary telescopes are located in Sutherland, which is 370 kilometres (230 mi) from Observatory, Cape Town, where the headquarters is located.
ASTRON is the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Its main office is in Dwingeloo in the Dwingelderveld National Park in the province of Drenthe. ASTRON is part of Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
The Medicina Radio Observatory is an astronomical observatory located 30 km from Bologna, Italy. It is operated by the Institute for Radio Astronomy of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) of the government of Italy.
The Shire of Murchison covers a large area of the Murchison sub-region of the central part of Western Australia, 300 kilometres (186 mi) northeast of Geraldton. The shire and the older 'Murchison' region and goldfield are now part of the designated Mid West region. It is Australia's second least populated local government area and the only one without a town.
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a joint project between an international consortium of organisations to construct and operate a low-frequency radio array. Operating in the frequency range 70–300 MHz, the main scientific goals of the MWA are to detect neutral atomic Hydrogen emission from the cosmological Epoch of Reionization (EoR), to study the sun, the heliosphere, the Earth's ionosphere, and radio transient phenomena, as well as map the extragalactic radio sky. It is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO).
Robert Martin Adam is the director of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio-telescope in South Africa. He used to be the chief-executive officer of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (NECSA). and Director General of the South African Department of Science and Technology. He has worked as a consultant to the governments of Namibia and Chile, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa.
In the early days of planning of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA) during the 1990s, the Chinese delegation vied to host the SKA, proposing to build several large dishes in the natural limestone depressions (karsts) that dimple its southwestern provinces, and called the proposal Kilometer-square Area Radio Synthesis Telescope (KARST).
MeerKAT, originally the Karoo Array Telescope, is a radio telescope consisting of 64 antennas in the Northern Cape of South Africa. In 2003, South Africa submitted an expression of interest to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Radio Telescope in Africa, and the locally designed and built MeerKAT was incorporated into the first phase of the SKA. MeerKAT was launched in 2018.
The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Mid West region of Western Australia. It is operated by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and forms part of the Australia Telescope National Facility. Construction commenced in late 2009 and first light was in October 2012.
The Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory (MRO) was established by CSIRO in 2009. It lies in a designated radio quiet zone located near Boolardy Station in the Murchison Shire of Western Australia, about 800 kilometres (500 mi) north of Perth on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.
KAT-7 is a radio telescope constructed in the Northern Cape of South Africa. Part of the Karoo Array Telescope project, it is the precursor engineering test bed to the larger MeerKAT telescope, but it has become a science instrument in its own right. The construction was completed in 2011 and commissioned in 2012. It also served as a technology demonstrator for South Africa's bid to host the Square Kilometre Array. KAT-7 is the first Radio telescope to be built with a composite reflector and uses a stirling pump for 75 K cryogenic cooling. The telescope was built to test various system for the MeerKAT array, from the ROACH correlators designed and manufactured in Cape Town, now used by various telescopes internationally, to composite construction techniques. With the short baselines the telescope is suited to observing diffuse sources, but will begin VLBI observation in 2013.
Lisa Harvey-Smith is a British-Australian astrophysicist, Australia's first Women in STEM Ambassador and Professor of Practice in Science Communication at the University of NSW.
Bernard Lewis Fanaroff is a South African astronomer and trade unionist. He served in many positions in the South African government related to labour unionism from 1994 to 2015. He is the co-developer of the Fanaroff–Riley classification, a method of classifying radio galaxies. He was the Project Director of South Africa's Square Kilometre Array bid.
Anna Margaret Mahala Scaife is a Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester and Head of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics Interferometry Centre of Excellence. She is the co-Director of Policy@Manchester. She was awarded the 2019 Royal Astronomical Society Jackson-Gwilt Medal in recognition of her contributions to astrophysical instrumentation.
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