Sky and Telescope - November 2017 - 84

FOCAL POINT by Govert Schilling

Reach Out & Touch

The Square Kilometre Array project in South Africa needs to involve locals - and fast.

The MeerKAT radio telescope, seen here in 2016, will eventually become integrated into South Africa's portion of the SKA.

N O V E M B E R 2 0 17 * S K Y & T E L E S C O P E

Hawai'i, strong religious objections exist.
Quite often, people feel they're victims of
some government-funded chain of events
that is beyond their control.
In the Great Karoo, construction of
the MeerKAT array - an SKA pathﬁnder
observatory - is well underway. By
the end of this year, project crews will
have erected 64 radio dishes, each 13.5
meters in diameter. Eventually, MeerKAT will be incorporated into the much
larger South African portion of the SKA.

No one had thought about
actively involving landowners from the very start.
That is, if enough land can be
acquired, hopefully without expropriation procedures.
When I visited the site in November
2016, I discussed these issues with SKA
media liaison ofﬁcer Angus Flowers.
To my astonishment, I learned that the
SKA Organization had not yet invited
local farmers to the facility. The nearby
town of Carnarvon has held public
hearings, but apparently no one had
thought about actively involving landowners from the very start and trying
to win their enthusiasm for the world's
biggest astronomy facility ever.
In Western Australia, where SKA's
low-frequency facilities will be built,

things went better. For many years,
astronomers have worked closely with
the Yamatji people who originally owned
the land. Likewise, when the LowFrequency Array - or LOFAR, consisting
of many thousands of small antennas
- went up in the Netherlands, ofﬁcials
organized "kitchen-table conversations"
with local farmers over many years,
gradually winning their support.
Knowing how sensitive these issues
can be, astronomers should always pay
a lot of attention - and enough money
- to communicating their plans to local
communities. Explain the science. Be
open and honest about your project's
goals and scope. Make clear that an
observatory passively studies the sky
and can't cause diseases. Above all, convey your passion for learning about the
wonderful world we all inhabit.
These days, public outreach and
education have become more important
than ever. I strongly believe that, in the
end, they will always have the potential
to succeed. After all, the urge to marvel
at and understand the universe is truly
universal. I just hope it's not too late for
SKA South Africa.
¢ S&T Contributing Editor GOVERT
SCHILLING is an astronomy writer in
the Netherlands. Ripples in Spacetime,
his book on gravitational waves, was
published in July.

SK A SOU TH A FRICA

WOULD YOU SELL your property to
scientists who plan to build the world's
largest array of radio telescopes? As a
reader of Sky & Telescope, you possibly
would. But farmers in the sparsely
populated Great Karoo semi-arid region
in South Africa are not so keen.
Most of them are very suspicious
of the plans for the Square Kilometre
Array (SKA; S&T: June 2017, p. 24).
Radio galaxies, pulsars, and the epoch
of reionization don't ring a bell with
them. Instead, they believe that the
SKA antennas will compromise their
cell-phone reception. Or, worse, that
the mysterious radio waves might cause
cancer. Local opposition to the future
observatory is ﬁerce - and growing.
Gone are the days when an astronomer would do his research at the eyepiece
of a telescope in his backyard, as William
Herschel did in the late 18th century.
Scientists are building ever-larger
structures to study both the macro- and
micro-cosmos. Just think of the ALMA
Observatory in Chile, the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, or the enormous,
underground particle-physics experiments at CERN in Switzerland.
Sometimes, protest against such facilities has an environmental basis. Endangered species might suffer from building
activities in remote areas, for example. In
other cases, as the Thirty Meter Telescope
consortium discovered on Mauna Kea,

Sky and Telescope - November 2017

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