China’s colossal Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (Fast) telescope has been completed and will now begin testing in southwestern China’s Guizhou Province.
The world's largest radio telescope was completed on September 25 and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Cas) has said it will now begin its 'debugging and testing stage' ahead of the official 'switch-on' later this year.
Read more: What are gravitational waves?
Fast features the world's largest aperture, at 500 metres, and has a total area equal to 30 football fields. It not only surpasses the Arecibo Observatory – once the world’s largest single-aperture telescope – in size, but also in sensitivity and overall performance.
Among the innovations is the adoption of an active, rather than passive, primary reflector. The dish is made up of reflectors that can be adjusted to account for signal deformation. This should result in a sensitivity twice that of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Arecibo is limited to an observable area around 20° from the zenith: FAST, with its adjustable reflector, should achieve 40°.
When it is put into operation, Fast will search space for gravitational waves, galaxies and the origin of life.
“Once completed, Fast will lead the world for at least 10 to 20 years,” said YAN Jun, director general of the telescope’s designer, builder and owner at the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) under CAS.
Fast was designed, developed and constructed by Chinese scientists. It will help astronomers survey neutral hydrogen in distant galaxies, detect faint pulsars, probe interstellar molecules, and search for alien signals, among other things.
Although it is a Chinese research facility, the telescope will be open to the international scientific community.
“As soon as the telescope works normally, the Time Allocation Committee (Tac) will distribute observation time according to the scientific value of the proposals,” said NAN Rendong, Fast’s general engineer and chief scientist.
Proposals from foreign scientists will be accepted as well.
This project was first envisaged in 1994. After more than 10 years of site surveying and key technology research. It was finally approved by the Chinese government in 2007.
The first of the 4,500 triangular aluminium panels that make up the dish was installed in July 2014, and the telescope should come online at the end of September, 23 years after it was conceived. The project demonstrates China's continued commitment to its ambitious space programme, during which it has become only the third country to put humans in space and to develop plans for a manned space station by 2020.
Construction of the telescope began in 2011 in Pingtang County, Guizhou Province, which is famous for its karst landforms and mountains that naturally protect against radio frequency interference. After more than five years of construction, the last of the telescope’s 4,450 reflecting panels was installed on July 3, marking the completion of major construction work.
Extracts of this article were first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
