A remote spot in SA’s Karoo desert has taken a first  step towards hosting one of the most powerful scientific instruments  in history, to shed light on how the universe began.

Driving the dirt road to the Karoo Array Telescope site, the FM  radio searches in vain for a frequency it can catch, scanning the  dial bottom to top and back again.

This very quiet corner of SA’s sparsely populated  Northern Cape province seems an unlikely place to build such an  instrument, but its silence is precisely what makes the Karoo an  attractive site for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope  project.

Scientists hope the SKA, a massive new radio telescope linking  3 000 antenna dishes, will shed new light on fundamental questions  about the universe, including how it began, why it’s expanding and  whether it contains life beyond our planet.

To do that, the SKA will need a quiet radio spectrum, clear  skies, high altitude and low seismic activity, according to Albert van Jaarsveld, president of the National Research  Foundation, which is helping mount the country’s bid to build the  ultra-powerful new telescope.

“The remoteness of this location is its strength and not its weakness,” Van Jaarsveld told journalists Tuesday on a visit to the  proposed site.

SA is competing with Australia to win the contract for  the SKA, a multibillion-dollar instrument that will be 50 times  more sensitive than today’s most powerful radio telescopes.

The countries are the last two candidates in a five-year  competition that has seen an international steering committee  narrow the field from five proposals to two.

SA, which plans to spend R234m on the project by 2015, has  built seven antenna dishes and recently linked two of them  together, the first time a multi-receptor radio telescope has been  tested, officials said Tuesday.

Van Jaarsveld said the test puts SA ahead of Australia  in the race for the SKA.

If SA wins the bidding, engineers will connect  antennas in the arid Karoo region by remote link to a network of  dishes stretching across southern and eastern Africa and as far away as Ghana.

Australia’s bid puts the core site at Mileura station, about 100km west of Meekathara in western Australia. Other antennas would be distributed across Australia and New  Zealand.

The SKA steering committee, which represents a consortium of 17  countries involved in the project, is expected to make its final  decision in 2012.

Scientists hope when the SKA is complete — sometime around 2021 – it will pick up radio waves emitted by the first stars and  galaxies to emerge from the big bang that created the universe.

It will also trace the effects of the so-called dark energy that is driving the universe apart and hunt for Earth-like planets  orbiting other stars.

SA officials hope the project will help make the country a hub of scientific activity and reverse the “brain drain”  that has seen Africa lose much of its top scientific talent to the  rest of the world.

“If we succeed in bringing the SKA to Africa, it will be a major  catalyst for the development of science and technology on our  continent,” said science & technology minister Naledi Pandor.

“I can tell you from speaking to scientists and academics  regularly that unless we have the facilities that make the study of  science attractive, we will not keep scientists in our country,” she said.

“Through this project, what we’ve begun to do is reverse the  brain drain.” — Sapa-AFP