Times of invention

Business Insider South Africa has named the most “exciting South African inventions” of the decade, and students, staff and alumni of the University of Cape Town (UCT) feature prominently on the list.

In January, the financial and business online news platform Business Insider South Africa announced a list of South Africa’s best innovations of the decade, and four student-led inventions, pioneered by University of Cape Town (UCT) alumni, have been named among the country’s finest.

SQUARE KILOMETRE ARRAY

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope (co-located in South Africa and Australia) and involves academics from UCT, the University of the Western Cape and the North-West University. When it’s completed it will cover over 1 million square metres and will help scientists seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature and origin of the universe.

Professor Russ Taylor, UCT / University of the Western Cape SKA Chair, explained that astronomers at the time realised they would need a telescope that was at least 100 times bigger than anything that existed at the time; to do that with the technology available at the time would have cost US$100 billion dollars.

“So we had to figure out how to build new telescopes over very large areas, very cheaply, but still with high performance. We also had to harness the new advances in computing and digital technologies to allow us to make use of that big area to collect images all the way back to the beginning of time.”

SKA will eventually use thousands of dishes and up to a million low-frequency antennas that will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail and survey the entire sky much faster than any system currently in existence.