Africa’s first Moon mission is South African-led, and local expertise slashed the cost

So, I think this is a great achievement for Africa, and not only scientifically and engineering-wise, but to show a new form of doing projects like this by collaborating. Well, the antennas, and the name are called Bounced African Low Lunar Spheres or Balls, which makes for really good headlights. So, what do they actually do? So, the balls each ball is an autonomous antenna.

Detects low-frequency radio waves. So, in radio astronomy, we detect radio waves, but on Earth, low-frequency radio waves under 20 megahertz are obscured by our atmosphere. So, this kind of science can only be done in space and ideally on the lunar surface. Okay, so what do they look like? I'm going to add some photographs to it, but what do they look like? How big are they? They literally look like balls. They are.

They are 30 centimeters in diameter. So we obviously have space constraints on the lander. And that was as big as we could go. And it's as small as we can go to do the science we need to do because the diameter of the ball does matter to the science. And so we have three antennas going. This is a technology demonstrator. And this will be the first, hopefully the first radio astronomy array on the lunar surface by any kind.

Country. And so we do hope that we'll do first-time science and possibly other first for Africa in this mission. So, what does it take to bring all this together? You mentioned industry and universities working with you. So, tenacity, definitely. I think this has been a great example of a new way of doing things. And I am actually the Africa Programme Manager for the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory.