THE African-European Radio Astronomy Platform, launched earlier this month, is "the right way to co-operate with Africa in partnership not only on the basic needs of the African people, but going a step further to a new generation of aid to development countries", says European Parliament member Maria da Graa Caravalho.

Earlier this year, the European Parliament adopted the Written Declaration 45/2011 on "Science Capacity Building in Africa: Promoting European-African Radio Astronomy Partnerships".

In May this year, South Africa was selected to host 70% of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be the biggest radio telescope in the world.

The SKA also includes satellite radio astronomy stations in eight African partner countries Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.

Also, African countries are converting their old and decommissioned telecommunications dishes into radio astronomy telescopes, with the goal of forming an African network of telescopes. This network, dubbed the African VLBI Network, is independent of South Africas bid to host the SKA.

The VLBI network makes use of very long baseline interferometry a radio astronomy technique that involves observing a single object through several telescopes simultaneously, so that all the telescopes act as one big telescope.

At present, the 26m Hartebeesthoek radio telescope is the only African telescope plugged into the European VLBI network, which is about 7,000km away. The Gauteng-based observatory has been doing VLBI measurements since the 1960s. As part of the European network, South Africa measures continental drift, which is critical for measuring polar motion and the absolute reference point for Global Positioning System stations in Southern Africa.

The partnership aims to be a "vehicle for societal changes and science awareness in Europe and Africa", says Domingos Barbosa, a member of the platform working at the Theoretical Physics Centre at the University of Porto, Portugal.

"The launch of the African-European Radio Astronomy Platform group in the European Parliament is a very important moment due to the relevance of the project," says Ms da Graa Caravalho. "The project is relevant to both European and African counterparts for the advancement of science and capacity building in Africa, especially capacity building in (areas that) will have a real impact on peoples lives from energy (and) space to medicine."

Mr Barbosa says he "cant think of many projects with such a wide impact (as the SKA and the African VLBI Network)".

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African-European radio astronomy partnership to benefit both continents