Sponsors

SKA South Africa

In 2012, after a nine-year bidding process, South Africa, together with eight African Partner Countries and Australia were named as co-hosts for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), one of the most ambitious international scientific projects of our time. The SKA will be powerful enough to detect radio waves from objects millions or even billions of light years away from Earth.

Scientists expect that the SKA will make new discoveries that we can't even imagine now. They may even find life elsewhere in the Universe. SKA SA is proud to host the first SETI Skills Development Workshop in partnership with AIMS and the Berkeley SETI Research Center. The future of the African Continent depends on our development of talented scientists who can take up the opportunity to develop new technologies and innovative solutions for challenging problems. The SETI Skills Development Workshop aims to introduce participants to a range of challenges from working with complex science instruments to processing the large amounts of data produced by projects such as the search of extraterrestrial life.

Berkeley SETI Research Center

In July 2015, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced the “Breakthrough Initiatives” - a series of large scale science programs to explore the possibility of other life in the universe. The first initiative launched was “Breakthrough Listen” - a 10-year effort to search for evidence of intelligent life among the nearest stars and nearest galaxies. The Breakthrough Listen program uses some of the largest and most sophisticated telescopes on the planet, including the 100m Green Bank Telescope in the United States and the 65m Parkes Telescope in Australia.

A key component of Breakthrough Listen is the public availability of both observational data and analysis software. During the AIMS SETI Skills Development Workshop, workshop participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the Breakthrough Listen program, download and examine observational data collected with the program and perform searches for signals of interest.

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