Of nearly 13 000 pupils in grades 8 to 11 who entered the Department of Science and Technology’s competition to raise awareness of Africa’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (Ska) – an international mega telescope – 774 were from the Eastern Cape.
Of nearly 13 000 pupils in grades 8 to 11 who entered the Department of Science and Technology’s competition to raise awareness of Africa’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (Ska) – an international mega telescope – 774 were from the Eastern Cape.
Ska will be 50 times more sensitive and more than ten thousand times faster than any other radio instrument, and built in the southern hemisphere, either in South Africa or Australia, where the view of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is best and radio interference least. It is intended to provide answers to questions about the origin of the Universe.
The winners of the department's competiton were to be announced in Pretoria today and Executive Director of the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement, Beverley Damonse, said was thrilled that the most sparsely populated province, the Northern Cape, where Africa’s own new radio telescope, the MeerKAT, was being constructed, had 722 entries.
Nearly 3 700 entries were from Limpopo Province and more than 2 800 were from Gauteng. Of the three top entrants in each province, the winner gets a laptop and the runner-up an iPod. The third-placed pupil gets a SKA pack which includes a back pack, memory stick, key ring and cap.
