Science writer and author Dava Sobel reports on the Square Kilometre Array, the world’s biggest telescope, with its antennae spiralling out across the African continent. In the remote North Karoo town of Carnarvon in South Africa, she meets the next generation of astronomers, training to run this major telescope facility, currently under construction.
And as we discover, since Copernicus’ naked eye observations through the mists on the Baltic Sea, there are more scientists, more knowledge, more support.. but the new technologies today, no matter how complex, are still fuelled by the pull of the heavens on the human heart and mind.
(Photo: South Africa’s Karoo-based KAT-7 radio telescope array are pictured at sunset at The Square Kilometre Array. Credit: Alexander Joe/AFP)
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