Inside FAST, Soon to be the World's Biggest and Baddest Radio Telescope

[n2doc]

By Clay Dillow Posted 06.14.2011 at 1:45 pm



Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory will soon be the world’s largest radio telescope no more. After years of planning, China has broken ground on the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), a massive bowl-shaped radio signal collector that will be the world’s most sensitive when it opens for business in 2016.

FAST’s framework was China’s engineering contribution to the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the international initiative to build a radio telescope with a full square kilometer of telescope surface area. That project has moved ahead and is now considering sites in South Africa and Australia where arrays of smaller distributed telescopes will be integrated into massive radio collecting instrument. But Chinese engineers knew that a massive, singular reflector like FAST was feasible and in 2006 gave the project the green light, choosing a natural depression in Guizhou province in southern China as FAST's home.

A new paper now details the progress in FAST’s design since then, and it shows that while FAST is rooted in Arecibo’s successful design, several engineering tweaks and the addition of a now-characteristic Chinese flourish--make it bigger and more powerful--mean that FAST will be able to see three times further in to space than Arecibo, scanning larger sections of the sky and processing all that data more quickly.

How? Arecibo has a fixed spherical curvature, so radio waves are focused into a line above the dish where more mirrors focus them to a single point that can be processed by instruments. Because of the way this works, Arecibo can only really use 221 meters (725 feet) of its 305-meter (1,000-foot) dish at any give time.

more

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-06/inside-fast-soon-be-worlds-biggest-and-baddest-radio-telescope


And we can't even decide to keep funding Arecibo. Feels like the end of the British, maybe the Roman, empire....

[physioex]

1. Yes....

Our ancient Tevatron, and the lack of desire to learn science will probably put us back to the dark ages.

[n2doc]

2. More like observers watching all the action from afar n/t