World’s largest single-dish radio telescope "FAST" made with Aluminium panels launched its first mission

China debuts the first mission in late January, one of the largest and sensitive radio telescopes in the world after a three-year trial period.

The spherical radio telescope with five hundred meters of aperture, or FAST for the intimate ones (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope), would help to learn more about the genesis and the evolutions of the universe, and incidentally to spy some aliens.

In the remote county of Pingtang in Guizhou during the year 2011, the construction began. The diameter is half Kms and it is marked as the second-largest radio telescope in the world after the Russian RATAN-600,  and the largest with the single satellite dish.

The device is made up of more than 4,400 Aluminum panels, operated by around 2,000 mechanical winches.

It is also considered as the most sensitive radio telescope in the world. Its sensitivity is for example equal to three times that of the American radio telescope of Arecibo, located on the north coast of the island of Puerto Rico.

In a statement, a scientist at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Beijing believes that FAST will help scientists "discover more unknown stars, cosmic phenomena and the laws of the universe, and even detect extra-terrestrial life".

The device is dedicatedly functional for detecting pulsars, these highly magnetized rotating neutron stars, which emit beams of electromagnetic radiation.

source https://www.alcircle.com/news/worlds-largest-single-dish-radio-telescope-fast-made-with-aluminium-panels-launched-its-first-mission-51047