South Africa Aims High With Telescope

Though the desolate hill where South Africa is building a new giant telescope is hundreds of miles away, Hartmut Winkler hopes the project will attract more students to his science classes.

“It’s a project which could sort of excite the public at large about science,” said Winkler, a physics professor at Vista University’s Soweto campus. “Astronomy is an easy road into science.”

The country’s science programs are desperately in need of excitement.

South African schoolchildren placed last in math and science, according to a recently released global study.

“There’s a need to push science as a whole, and just teaching people through book work won’t be the way to do it. We need something more exciting, like astronomy,” Winkler said.

The South African Large Telescope, to be built in four to five years, will help scientists study the formation of the universe.

With an effective aperture of 11 yards, it will tie as the world’s largest optical telescope with the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

The telescope will specialize in spectroscopy, measuring the colors present in light reflected by an object to learn what materials it comprises and how it is moving.

The government hopes the telescope will also boost tourism and improve the skills of South African companies, which will do much of the construction and provide most of the materials.

“The new telescope will have two primary objectives: to do cutting-edge physics and to change the fortunes of the country,” Khotso Mokhle, president of the National Research Foundation, said.

The telescope will stand in the desolate Karoo region.

“This site can be ranked among the best in the world,” said Michael Dennefeld, a member of the International Astronomical Union’s instrumentation section and a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris.

The telescope will give scientists a better view of the Magellanic Clouds, galaxies that are impossible to observe from the Northern Hemisphere, Dennefeld said. The telescope will also improve observations of the center of the Milky Way, which is difficult to view from the north.

South Africa has a strong astronomy tradition, but it has always been constrained by its limited equipment, Dennefeld said.

“They did a good job with the small telescopes they had. Building the larger telescope is a natural step,” he said.

The new telescope will be able to record light as faint as a candle flame at the distance of the moon.

Universities and institutions in New Zealand, Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Poland are paying two-thirds of the $22-million construction cost in return for observing time. The South African government is paying the remainder.

The telescope will have symbolic importance to all South African scientists, proving the country can do world-class science projects, Whitelock said.

“It will be a flagship to South African science,” she said.