Chinese technicians are assembling a massive reflector on what will be the world's largest and most sophisticated radio telescope deep in the country's southwest mountainous area.
The ambitious astronautics project, named Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope ("FAST") owing to its 500-meter diameter, will be three times more sensitive than the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is currently the largest of its kind.
The Wuchang Shipbuilding Industry, a leading contractor for FAST, schedules to begin assembling the dish – which has a size of 30 football fields combined – on Sunday. But ahead of the assembly process, workers had already gathered at the construction site in Guizhou Province on Saturday to conduct a final stress test.
"A key factor is the reliability of the whole thing during the process: the tower crane, the conveyor system, and the cables will be operating together and we must see to it that no workpiece breaks away in mid-air," said Huang Wanping, executive director of the unit in charge of the reflector's assembly.
"Pinpoint accuracy is required when we need to convey the workpieces to a specified location," Huang added.
Built at a cost of 1.2 billion yuan (196 million U.S. dollars), the telescope is expected to be completed in September next year.
The dish is made up of hundreds of thousands of small equilateral triangle units, which will be pieced together into 4,450 large panels. Cables fixed to the rear of each panel allow positions to be changed to within accuracy of one millimeter, ensuring the telescope receive signals from different angles, according to one designer.
"The planeness requirement for each small unit is 1.5 millimeters, and when assembled into large panels, we need their surface finish to be as precise as 2 mm," said Zheng Yuanpeng, chief designer of the FAST reflector and research fellow with the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group.
It is estimated that FAST, equipped with multi-beam receivers, could detect some 7,000 pulsars in the Milky Way galaxy in less than a year. But the most exciting goal of FAST is its search for extraterrestrial life, according to scientists working on the project.
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