Placing the Cosmic Background: The Ghana Radio Astronomy Observatory as an Ambient Infrastructure

Recent years have seen an acceleration and proliferation of space science initiatives across the African continent. Ghana and Kenya established official space programs in 2012 and in 2016 Ethiopia and the African Union adopted a Space Policy (Asabere et al. 2015). These add to existing initiatives in South Africa and Nigeria, inscribing them in both continental and international networks (Camilo 2018; Pović et al. 2018). Notable among these big space science projects is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), based in South Africa and extending across the continent. Comparable to the human genome project in its scale (Benoit 2018), the network of telescopes exceeds the sensitivity and size of large particle-accelerating machines (Hoeppe 2014). In 2017 Ghana became the second African country to participate in this network, anchoring the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (AVN). As the station most distant from the SKA core site in South Africa, the Ghana facility - because it is close to the equator - is able to cover both the northern sky and underexplored southern sky. Operating alongside the SKA, although at different frequencies, the AVN will train radio astronomers to sense and make sense of hyperobjects as vast as the center of the Milky Way galaxy.