South African technology front and centre for SKA-Mid telescope
EMSS was awarded the construction contract to deliver one of the SKA-Mid telescope’s three receivers, the Band 2 feed, and will deliver 60 of the highly specialised components.
The Band 2 feed operates from 950 to 1760 MHz; it is the component that receives the faint signals from space and does the first stage of amplification while adding as little noise as possible. To this end, the feed is cryogenically cooled with compressed helium. EMSS has collaborated extensively with Oxford Cryosystems over the years to ensure the cryogenic coolers are suitable for the harsh environment of the Karoo where the telescopes are located and perform reliably.
This extremely sensitive instrument must also comply with the very strict radio frequency interference (RFI) requirements for components mounted on the SKA-Mid dishes, something EMSS is particularly experienced in, alongside expertise in RFI testing and analysis.
The EMSS production team has grown from just five people at the start of MeerKAT production to a team of 20 working on the SKA-Mid contract. Many are young employees who were recruited directly from universities and have benefitted from on-the-job training in electronics and mechanical engineering.
A big testament to our success are the jobs people find after working at EMSS, going into the space and military technology industries and continuing their careers there. We are very proud to be part of enabling that transfer of knowledge between sectors.
The innovations that have come from working within the technically demanding and high-precision field of radio astronomy have enabled EMSS to develop spin-off technologies and grow the business further. Since the start of SKA-Mid construction, its facility near Stellenbosch has had to be expanded to double its size to accommodate both the spin-off work and the SKA-Mid work.
Its success has caught the eye of other astronomy projects too; EMSS is working with the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory on the design of the optics and the lowest frequency feed package for the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) radio telescope project.
