Visions for Infrastructure

What infrastructure would be needed to make all this happen?
There needs to be a concerted effort towards improving not only the funding for research, but also the upgrading of key communications and IT infrastructure, and ensuring access to such infrastructure for staff and students. This is of paramount importance for participation in global science endeavours.

Status / Challenges:

  • Internet access can be intermittent, unreliable, or non-existent at universities
  • Being able to connect to the internet is crucial for many rural people. Hence access to information is a challenge to many people. Therefore for Astronomy to reach out to rural areas in African Countries an initiative should be formed (or collaborated with) to enhance connectivity(See, e.g. ConnectRuralAfrica).
  • OneWeb and Starlink (and other future technologies) could benefit the African continent, noting the concerns around satellite interference on astronomy facilities. This could be done in collaboration with the IAU’s Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Interference

Actions:

  • Involve high level decision makers to ensure that internet access is addressed at key institutions (including universities, observatories, conference centres, etc)
  • Explore partnerships with innovative initiatives that could provide internet access in a sustainable way.

Potential Stakeholders:

National Research Foundation, African Union

Call for proposals

Status / Challenges:

  • Limited access to high performance computing facilities. Efforts currently underway by CHPC and others to establish HPC hubs across Africa.
  • Emerging cloud computing initiatives e.g. IDIA
  • It is difficult to communicate if we do not have a mutually understandable language. Many young scientists are using windows as operating systems and do not know about Linux or scripting languages (like Python)

Actions:

  • Pursue a coordinated agenda developing both cloud computing infrastructure (focus on access to data and compute power at universities, interoperability, ease of use and training) and access to HPC (focus on performance for computationally intensive applications, e.g. simulations, requiring a dedicated facility).
  • Coordinate those development efforts with astronomy development efforts, and related skills development e.g. Python

Potential Stakeholders:

IDIA, CHPC

Call for proposals

Status / Challenges:

  • Many universities starting astronomy programs wish to have small telescopes for both training and outreach e.g. Unizulu has purchased one, DARA have funded several small optical telescopes with CCD, laptop and software as well as radio telescopes at African universities
  • It may be much more likely to  get research training/publications using virtual observatories than via a small telescope, but there are other advantages to having a small telescope at a university.

Actions:

  • Establish a suite of small telescope “packages” (list of equipment, capabilities, related teaching exercises, guidelines, etc). See e.g. the African Radio Astronomy Network presented by James Chibueze at the Forum on Astronomy in Africa and https://www.gerafoundation.com/
  • Identify potential host institutions for small telescopes and source funding to roll out the above package.
  • Identify engineers and people who have the relevant capability to build small telescopes.
  • Encourage Astronomy Instrument development with locally sourced materials. See affordable radio telescope example presented by Ikechukwu Obi at the Forum on Astronomy in Africa

Potential Stakeholders:

HartRAO/SARAO, SAAO, NWU, UCT

Call for proposals

Status / Challenges:

  • There are many opportunities to access telescopes remotely. A trial consolidated list was developed at the OAD.
  • SAAO has several new remote observing opportunities in Sutherland
  • The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) is running online trainings
  • e-MERLIN has a special call out for African astronomers
  • AstroLab[2] is a project that provides training on using telescopes remotely. The latest training event was held at Unizulu and aimed at training tutors in Southern Africa
  • Access to world telescopes (eg. NOT, CFHT, AAT, LCO etc) is possible via the ORP bi-annual call

Actions:

  • Update and publicise existing lists of remote observing opportunities
  • Explore new opportunities e.g. Universities with automated telescopes could also offer remote access to partners who don’t have their own. For example, UCT is aiming to build in remote access to their teaching radio telescopes so they can share access with other institutions and enable students to take data remotely which they can then analyse at their home institute
  • Reserve substantial time on a small professional telescope for training.
  • Build into future workshops the training to use telescopes remotely
  • Exploit opportunities to use virtual observatories to access/use observations from international observatories.

Potential Stakeholders:

Vanessa Moss (ATCA), IVOA (not responsible but can help to provide info), Kshitij Thorat (can help with Astrolab), Encarni Romero and David Buckley work with ORP, we can distribute bi-annual calls via email.

Call for proposals

Status / Challenges:

  • It is often the case across Africa that it is easier to access the internet via mobile networks than landlines/fibre.

Actions:

  • Explore innovative ways of using the mobile network infrastructure for astronomy training, education, and outreach. For example, see existing tools such as x2go, which can allow “low-cost” image viewing when optimised. Image storage can then easily be centralised.
  • Explore the possibility of a portable and affordable kit that enables a combination of power (e.g. solar) and internet (e.g. Terrestrial or satellite mobile wifi).

Potential Stakeholders:

NAECs (It is important that NAECs have some sort of relationship with teachers and other astronomy practitioners), Local Universities

Call for proposals

Status / Challenges:

  • Astronomical data from African facilities is not currently easily accessible or usable, even when outside proprietary periods, yet modern archives are both a source of new science, training and citations.
  • Increasingly, observatories are adopting the IVOA protocols and make their data available through APIs such as astroquery or pyVO[3] and some even offer remote access to work with the data[4]. See e.g. the entire NASA Space Telescopes archive (MAST) available through the python astroquery package. pyVO is intended for access with IVOA standards. See e.g. https://datalab.noao.edu
  • SARAO are developing an archive for MeerKAT data
  • SKAO are developing their archiving requirements now for SKA data (2025+)
  • SALT data is available and an archive for other SAAO data is under development
  • Establish Astronomy archives and libraries  in countries without them to enhance availability of astronomical information.

Actions:

  • Development of an astronomical data archive (or several well-linked archives from a central database) for observations carried out in African observatories
  • Provide support for African observatories to ensure their data archives are of high quality and follow international standards (VO, FAIR principles), which will enable greater collaboration and sharing/use of data.
  • Publicise existing archives and related resources e.g. educational resources using data from African archives
  • Explore potential offline data usage e.g. distribution of CDs or Flash drives with VO and data already on the drive in remote areas where internet access is difficult

Potential Stakeholders:

SALT is willing to contribute/help

Call for proposals

Status / Challenges:

  • There is limited coordination in terms of the recording, preserving, and sharing astronomy heritage data in Africa (including indigenous knowledge)

Actions:

Potential Stakeholders:

Auke, Sivuyile, SKAO, Somaya Saad

Call for proposals

© 2024 IAU General Assembly 2024 – Cape Town