Technicians have begun assembling the world's largest radio telescope, with a dish the size of 30 football grounds, deep in the mountains of southwest China's Guizhou Province. It will have three times the sensitivity of Arecibo and will be able to scan a larger area of the sky.
It will be completed in 2016
Unlike Arecibo, which has a fixed spherical curvature, FAST will use an active surface that adjusts to create parabolas in different directions, with an effective dish size of 300 m. This means that it will not be confined to pointing directly upwards, but capable of covering the sky within 40° from the zenith, compared to Arecibo's 20° range. Its working frequency will be 70 MHz to 3.0 GHz, with a pointing precision of 4 arcseconds
They began to assemble the telescope's reflector, which is 500 meters in diameter and made up of 4,450 panels. Each panel is an equilateral triangle with sides 11 meters long.
Once complete, the single-aperture spherical telescope called FAST will be the world's largest, exceeding the one at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters in diameter
The new radio telescope will have an area of about 196,000 square meters vs the Arecibo 70,000 square meters. Therefore the new radio telescope will by about 2.5 times more area than Arecibo.
The giant dish is being built on a naturally formed bowl-like valley. "There are three hills about 500 meters away from one another, creating a valley that is perfect to support the telescope," said Sun Caihong, FAST's chief engineer.
The karst formation in the local landscape is good for draining rainwater underground and protecting the reflector, Sun said.
The surrounding area has "radio silence" as there are no towns and cities within a 5-kilometer radius and only one county center within 25 kilometers.
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China's 500 meter radio telescope in 2014
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What it will look like when finished
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It will be completed in 2016
Unlike Arecibo, which has a fixed spherical curvature, FAST will use an active surface that adjusts to create parabolas in different directions, with an effective dish size of 300 m. This means that it will not be confined to pointing directly upwards, but capable of covering the sky within 40° from the zenith, compared to Arecibo's 20° range. Its working frequency will be 70 MHz to 3.0 GHz, with a pointing precision of 4 arcseconds
They began to assemble the telescope's reflector, which is 500 meters in diameter and made up of 4,450 panels. Each panel is an equilateral triangle with sides 11 meters long.
Once complete, the single-aperture spherical telescope called FAST will be the world's largest, exceeding the one at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters in diameter
The new radio telescope will have an area of about 196,000 square meters vs the Arecibo 70,000 square meters. Therefore the new radio telescope will by about 2.5 times more area than Arecibo.
The giant dish is being built on a naturally formed bowl-like valley. "There are three hills about 500 meters away from one another, creating a valley that is perfect to support the telescope," said Sun Caihong, FAST's chief engineer.
The karst formation in the local landscape is good for draining rainwater underground and protecting the reflector, Sun said.
The surrounding area has "radio silence" as there are no towns and cities within a 5-kilometer radius and only one county center within 25 kilometers.
Read more »
