China building world’s biggest radio telescope
Since its completion in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, with a diameter of 305 m (1,000 ft) and a collecting area of 73,000 square meters (790,000 sq ft), has been the largest single-aperture radio telescope ever constructed. But Arecibo is set to lose its title with construction now underway in Guizhou Province in southern China of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Upon its expected completion in 2016, FAST will be able to see more than three times further into space and survey the skies ten times faster than Arecibo.
FAST was first proposed by China for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which has since opted to combine the signals of thousands of smaller antennae spread over a distance of more than 3,000 km (1,864 miles), combining for a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometer (0.38 square miles). The SKA will be built in the southern hemisphere with South Africa and Australia currently vying for the right to host the project.
Despite this, an international review and advisory conference on the science and technology of FAST held in Beijing in 2006 concluded FAST was feasible. In the following year funding for FAST was given the green light and the approved budget now sits at CNY700 million (approx. US$107.9 million). Construction in the Dawodang depression in south Guizhou commenced in March.
No comments:
Post a Comment