Installation was completed on the world’s largest radio telescope , Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Pingtang County, southwest China’s Guizhou Province ,which consists of 4,450 panels fitted into the center of the big dish.This telescope is bigger than Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters in diameter.
“As the world’s largest single aperture telescope located at an extremely radio-quiet site, its scientific impact on astronomy will be extraordinary, and it will certainly revolutionize other areas of the natural sciences,” said Nan Rendong, chief scientist with the FAST Project.
The telescope site was a remote location which housed only 65 people , who were relocated .An additional 9,110 people living within a 5 km radius of the telescope were relocated to create a radio-quiet area.
The reflector is made of perforated aluminum panels supported by a mesh of steel cables hanging from the rim.FAST’s surface is made of 4450 triangular panels, 11 m (36 ft) on a side,in the form of a geodesic dome. Actuators underneath make it an active surface, pulling and pushing on joints between panels, deforming the flexible steel cable support into a parabolic antenna aligned with the desired sky direction.Its working frequency range of 70 MHz to 3.0 GHz.
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