24 Aug 2017

The Minister of Tertiary Education, Research, Science and Technology (MoTE), Dr Alfred Madigele is in Ghana to attend the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) African Ministerial forum meeting which started on August 23.

A press release from the ministry states that the SKA is a large multi radio telescope project to be built in Australia/New Zeal and South Africa.

The release further explains that if built, the project will have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometre and will operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size will make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument.

“The SKA will require very high performance central, computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the global Internet traffic as of 2013 as well as be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than ever before,” it states.

According to the press release, the purpose of the ministerial forum is to discuss and coordinate positions of mutual interest and identify future directions of institutionalising cooperation in radio astronomy, particularly on the SKA and African Very Long Baseline Interferometer (AVN) projects.

The meeting will end with the launch of the Astronomy Observatory in Kuntunse. ENDS