South African National Space Agency (SANSA): Bursaries 2024

SANSA provides post graduate degree bursaries to contribute to the national target for qualified post-graduates in Science and Engineering. .

Bursaries are offered in the following fields of study:

Earth Observation (Hons, MSc, PhD)

• Remote Sensing
• Geospatial programming
• Earth system science with remote sensing
• Earth observations in ecosystems accounting
• Applications of remote sensing in environmental management including oceans and marine, agriculture and rangelands, water resource management, mineral resource and spatial planning

Engineering (MEng, MTech, MSc, PHD, DTech)

• Software and Software Systems Engineering
• Aeronautical, Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronic, Mechatronic And Computer Engineering
• Space, Systems, Antenna and RF Engineering

Space Science (Hons, MSc, MPhil, PhD)

• Solar physics and space weather forecasting
• Antarctic radar studies of atmosphere gravity waves
• Multi-instrument studies of space weather
• Modelling geomagnetically induced in power systems
• Multi-scale ionospheric physics, structure and dynamics
• Ionospheric and radio propagation modelling
• Theory of waves and solutions in plasmas
• Atmospheric radiation studies
• Verification of space weather forecasting

All SANSA divisions (Hons, MSc, PHD)

• Computer science
• Information Systems
• Software and systems engineering
• Data Science
• Field of your choice related to key SANSA objectives

Candidate Requirements:

• Only application within the mandated STEM fields will be considered.
• Applicants with a minimum average of 65% for their last academic year or qualification will be considered, in conjunction with the previous point.
• SANSA projects can be found on https://research.sansa.org.za/ under Projects . All proposal submissions in the related study areas will be submitted, for consideration, to our bursary committees.
• SANSA welcomes any new projects that relates to our listed projects and encourage applicants to contact our researchers for advice and assistance with their proposals.
• Masters and doctoral bursars MUST reapply every year for continued funding.

Bursary criteria:

The main criteria used in the selection of successful applicants are Financial need, Academic potential and Career-oriented study programmes

What the bursary offers:

We are currently revising the bursary values for 2024 and these will be communicated in due course. We fund the individual programmes as follow:

• Hons – one-year R100 000 (excluding allowance to be determined on a case-to-case basis)
• Masters – two years R120 000 (all inclusive)
• PhD – three years R140 000 (all inclusive)

NB. Applicants may not hold a combination of bursaries that exceed these amounts. Should an applicant have another bursary of lessor amount, SANSA will consider providing a top-up amount to the student provided the student meets our External Bursary Policy criteria.