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"Tour the Universe" from Africa's largest Scifest

This month Africa's largest science festival kicks off in Grahamstown South Africa. We preview some of the attractions at this annual event.

SciFest star and satellite scientist Maggie Aderin working on an aircraft missile warning system under test in Wales with a colleague from British company Qinetic. Aderin, whose parents hail from Nigeria, will be visiting South Africa for the first time at the upcoming national science festival in Grahamstown. Nearly 40,000 people visit Sasol SciFest every year, making it Africa's most successful science outreach effort.

Space engineer and science role model Maggie Aderin is on her way to South Africa's popular national science festival, Sasol SciFest, which draws crowds of 40 000 to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape every year.

“I got the space bug when I was 6 years old, and through my work I have been able to see more of this world and the solar system than I would have ever thought possible,” says Maggie.

The daughter of Nigerian emigrants to the UK, Maggie is a kind of tailor. Only instead of making bespoke suits for demanding businessmen, this mechanical engineer makes stylish bespoke instrumentation for an extraordinary range of multi-million rand projects, ranging from hand-held landmine detectors to spectrographs which can "see" waves of light beyond human power for an astronomical observatory in Chile. For her PhD she developed an instrument still used today to test engine oils and additives.

Maggie is completing a climate monitoring system for a European Space Agency satellite due to launch in 2008. "What you're trying to do is make something bound not to fail," she cheerfully says. She's also part of a global project to produce the new-generation successor to the Hubble space telescope. NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) says the new James Webb Space Telescope will see first light in 2013.

So perhaps it's no surprise that one of her personal goals is to travel to Mars. Another is to encourage as many schoolchildren as possible to explore and enjoy science. Maggie is a well-known figure in the United Kingdom for her science outreach enthusiasm. She explains: “As a scientist I have a duty to make science accessible to the public.”

She has been asked to film 'kitchen sink' experiments in her garden for broadcast on Children's BBC and made it through to the finals of FameLab, the televised science equivalent of Idols, last year“. I really felt the pressure in the heats and three minutes is not long to get a scientific concept across and impress the judges, but I loved the challenge!” she said.

Public understanding of science is a cause close to Maggie's heart. So she set up her own company, Science Innovation, which takes the audience on a 'Tour of the Universe,' a taste of space from our planet through the solar system, out to the Milky Way and beyond.

“Many school girls say that they think that science is ‘boys stuff’ so don’t give it a try,” she says. “This is rubbish; science should be available to anyone with an interest, male, female, black or white.”

More information:

  Maggie Aderin speaks on the opening day of Sasol SciFest on March 21 at 2 pm in the Guy Butler Theatre in the 1820 Settlers' Monument in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. She has a second talk on Thursday March 22 on climate change, and what space can teach us about planet Earth. Each talk is R8.

www.scifest.org.za

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