MeerKAT radio telescope a beacon of technological development in South Africa

More than 260 scientific papers have so far been published, using data gathered by South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array, with 40% of them being published in the past year, highlighted Higher Education, Science and Innovation Mininster Dr Blade Nzimande, in Stellenbosch, on Tuesday. “This is really very exciting,” he said, addressing the MeerKAT@5 conference, which was celebrating five years of operations by the radio telescope. MeerKAT is located in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape province. He further pointed out that, in response to the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (Sarao’s) latest call for proposals for observation time on the instrument, there had been 170 projects submitted. This number far exceeded the time available on the telescope. Of these proposals, about 25% were from research teams led by South Africans.