Astrophysics (Index)About

FAST

(Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, Tianyan)
(Arecibo-like 500 m telescope in China)

FAST (Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope) is a large radio telescope in Guizhou, China, which saw first light in 2016 and reached full operational in 2020, the largest single-dish telescope in the world. It is similar to Arecibo Observatory (a very large stationary dish pointed straight up, situated in a depression in the ground) but with the ability to aim further from the zenith: to 40° from zenith compared to Arecibo's 20°. The dish is 500 m across (Arecibo's was 305 m), but any observation uses 300 m, the additional size allowing pointings away from the zenith that still have a collecting area 300 m in diameter. Though it has spherical in its name, it deforms the reflector into a parabolic shape directed at its target. It has nine feeds spanning 70 MHz to 3 GHz.


(radio,telescope,ground,China)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_hundred_meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope
http://fast.bao.ac.cn/
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011IJMPD..20..989N/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019RAA....19...16L/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020RAA....20...64J/abstract

Referenced by pages:
Chinese Pulsar Timing Array (CPTA)
fast radio burst (FRB)

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