China has announced that it is building the world’s largest telescope with a dish that equals the size of 30 football pitches.
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Technicians began attaching 4,450 triangular-shaped panels to the telescope’s reflector yesterday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
It said, FAST will be the world’s largest single-aperture telescope, that will overtake the Arecibo Observatory in the US territory of Puerto Rico, which is 305 metres (1000 feet) in diameter.
The dish can shift to receive radio from different angles, said Zheng Yuanpeng, chief engineer of the telescope’s panel project.
With a perimeter of about 1.6 km, it will take about 40 minutes to walk around the telescope.
The panels of the telescope have been designed in such a way that their position can be altered with the aid of connected wires and parallel robots. Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical said. “We can control their position with an accuracy of 1 mm”.
The head of production for China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), Yang Dingjiang, stated that possible contact with aliens is only one of the aims of the radio telescope.
“There are three hills about 500 meters away from one another, creating a valley that is ideal to support the telescope”, Sun Caihong, chief engineer of FAST’s construction told Xinhua News.
The regions topography which is aided by caves and porous rocks will help in draining rain water efficiently, the report from a Chinese media outlet said.
The huge dish is hung over the ground supported by thousands of steel pillars and cables.
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The latest move is part of Beijing’s overall ambitious efforts to step up the country’s multi-billion dollar space research and development program, which includes plans for a permanent orbiting station by the year 2020 and a manned mission to the Moon. Work on this massive telescope will officially come to an end next year and will be a major milestone for China’s space exploration program. Construction of the radio telescope began in 2011, and the project will be completed in 2016.
