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China Building World's Biggest Radio Telescope
Zothecula writes "Since its completion in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, with a diameter of 305 m (1,000 ft) and a collecting area of 73,000 square meters (790,000 sq ft), has been the largest single-aperture radio telescope ever constructed. But Arecibo is set to lose its title with construction now underway in Guizhou Province in southern China of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Upon its expected completion in 2016, FAST will be able to see more than three times further into space and survey the skies ten times faster than Arecibo."
What does that acronym stand for in Chinese?
After all these years, I finally fell for it. Just off to bleach my eyes.. thanks for that.
Thank god the page took its time to load. I was able to close the tab before any disgusting picture showed.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
than the trend towards arrays of radio telescopes? Is this just for bragging rights or are they interested in really pushing the bounds of what the technology can do?
Given the 5 to 3 ratio in apertures between the two telescopes, I think that it will be able to "peer" (25/9)^0.5 = 5/3 = 1.67 times "further into space," where "peer" means resolve an object at a given signal to noise ratio. Collected light scales with the square of aperture, but signal to noise ratio only improves with the square root of the number of collected photons. In more useful terms, it should be able to resolve the same thing to the same statistical certainty in 3/5 of the time.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Ah, a sheep troll. "Baaa! I post disgusting photos! Baaa!"
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
More radio telescopes are generally a good thing. One of the major tensions in the field now is whether one should have large radio telescopes or lots of comparatively smaller ones that coordinate their work. Both methods have different advantages. Lots of smaller telescopes linked has the major advantage that if some of them go down for some reason one can still do good science. However, the larger ones can have lots of neat technologies. As TFA discusses, this telescope (FAST) will be able to deform its mirrors in real time to focus on sources. That will help a lot for work on faint radio sources.
However, I'm not sure that this is the best use of resources. As discussed in TFA, the Square Kilometre array is being built by a variety of countries working together, and it will do a lot of the same stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array However, the SKA and FAST will be looking at different regions of the sky, and where they do overlap will be looking at different times. So overall this is helpful. Personally, if I were going to be putting this much resources into interesting Earth-based astronomy, I'd probably want to focus more on increasing our neutrino detectors. We're not investing very much in that, and it is a very new, very interesting field of astronomy/astrophysics. Moreover, neutrino astronomy is pretty much the only thing that can give us warning (albeit only a few hours) if a nasty supernova happens in our vicinity. Right now, that doesn't look likely, but it would be nice to have some warning in case our models are off. Moreover, even without a threat issue, since neutrinos can arrive before the light from a supernova (since the neutrino burst occurs before most of what we would call a supernova, and neutrinos travel at very close to the speed of light), they can help us point our optical and X-ray telescopes in the right regions before we the light reaches us, which is really helpful for advancing our understanding of such events.
Overall though, shouldn't be complaining. It is very difficult to get almost any good funding now for astronomy and cosmology research. In that regard, this is a good thing.
yay! more data for the SETI mesh to chew on.
Trying to steal intellectual property from alien lifeforms. Clever, clever bastards.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
I was at the Arecibo telescope last month and after seeing it in person I think it is no surprise China is building a larger one. 1000ft seems pretty small when standing on the dish.
We CANNOT have a Telescope Gap! /with apologies to George C. Scott
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Boy am I tired of the Chinese obsession with size. Everything has to be either the biggest, or the smallest. Think of all the recent headlines along the lines of "China building largest intercontinental rail" or "China building worlds smallest computer chip" or "China building the largest solar power plant" or "China has the smallest currency value" or the largest GDP or the most number of university graduates or the smallest standard of living... why not give other countries a chance?
What if a bunch of aliens in Alpha Centauri start talking about freedom, democracy, or the Jasmine Revolution.
How is china supposed to censor free speach _in space_ ?
Why are you trying so desperately to turn any discussion about China into a political one?
"Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope"? "FAST"?
First of all, it's a Chinese telescope and its name is an English acronym. How fucking stupid is that? And "Five-hundred-meter"? Since when is the first letter of a NUMBER (spelled out in words) significant for the purposes of an acronym? Stupid. And "radio" apparently isn't important enough to be represented in the acronym either. Last (but not least), it isn't even fucking spherical, it's parabolic (like ANY OTHER radio telescope).
Fucking stupid on so many levels. What is this I don't even...
Wonderful. An acronym Nazi.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Now we'll have to buy 10x more hardware to keep up in SETI@Home. We'll never finish!
the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico
What the heck is that?
*googles it*
Ohhhh, why didn't you just say "the dish thingy from GoldenEye"?
space NAZIs, I hate Illinois space NAZIs...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Because it is the fucking elephant in the room!
"The laws of science be a harsh mistress." --Bender
Yeah -- and an incorrect one, at that. Not all radio telescopes are parabolic. Arecibo, for instance, is spherical. The original paper even notes, "FAST is an Arecibo-type spherical telescope" (p. 3).
I always thought that in radio astronomy you can accomplish more by a lot of small radar dishes linked up than with one single huge one? Wasn't there at some point a plan to send a bunch of sats up that would fly in formation to form a friggin' HUGE (read: several thousand miles) array for radioastronomy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Upon its expected completion in 2016, FAST will be able to see more than three times further into space and survey the skies ten times faster than Arecibo.
Good thing that Arecibo has had a 53 year headstart.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why are you trying so desperately to turn any discussion about China into a political one?
Well, why not? Every discussion about the US turns into a long list of complaints about how either a) America sucks and has always sucked, or b) America is giving up its superpower status to the Chinese.
What do consider Big Science? Getting a better picture of the universe can be a good thing but it doesn't really contribute much to day to day life but people are still funding, building, operating, and sharing observatories, particle accelerators, solar test farms, and other large scale research level projects for pure academic and scientific study. I think it is amazing that there are still people who fund these types of programs without ever expecting a return on their investments in their life time. In today's dog eat dog world these types of people are getting harder to find. To me Big Science today should concentrate on alternative energy science and bio-medical research. Big Science applies to the military who have been pushing the limit of technology forward for the last 2000 years. While the general public makes do with incremental advancements in computer technology focused on generating more sales the military often jumps ahead with radical new methods and technology without needing to worry about backwards capadibility concerns and often not needing to worry about funding from our generous and duplitious politicians. While normal people are debating the finer points of game controllers and cpu architecture the military is using holographic heads up targeting technology to aim and fire missles just by blinking your eyes while flying at mach 2 and simulataneous monitoring up to 100 potential threats in the air and on the ground in real time.
Encase the entire nation in a Faraday cage. Think of the jobs it will create!
But anyway, wouldn't an array of smaller, semi-mass produced scopes be better?
Well, well... you replying to a goatse troll in the context of your sig had certain images coming up. You excuse me while I go for the brain bleach, yes?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
See, you buy stuff at WalMart, and you fund a radio telescope!
What's an elephant doing that deep in space? I know NASA launched monkeys and Russia sent up some dogs, but is there something else we should know?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's fundamentally not the elephant in the room. An "elephant in the room" is an obvious issue that no-one talks about. The difficulty is in having a single god damn conversation about anything that happens in a country containing 1.3 billion people without it turning into the exact same discussion. Yes China can be a very nasty place in terms of censorship, and yes every single reader of Slashdot knows that. Do we need to hammer it home again?
Can't we talk about astronomy, and how cool it is that a new record-breaking observatory is getting built?
Actually they've got so many big projects going that they're waving their scientific instrumentation dick around and building important and useful infrastructure projects at the same time.
I dunno. The politics over SKA, where it would be located, etc, show that people do indeed care. Nobody can put a telescope even the size of the Lovell dish into space, never mind the size of this monster. Single dishes have benefits (such as reduced edge effects) that arrays do not, which is extremely important for some of the science needed. Radio telescopes are still the only systems you can build large interferometers from (you can do small optical interferometers, but that's it). RFI is an increasing problem for radio observatories, due to flagrant abuse of the spectrum by many nations, and it's much easier to shield one site than a hundred. Precision-engineering a single dish of this size will require advances in material science that will have spin-off benefits in other fields.
In short, there's lots of reasons for them to do this and no obvious reason for them to copy SKA or SHA.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So, I guess we know how Aperture Science started now. Interesting.
...
Now excuse me, I have to get back to testing
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
well... really damn big variable-geometry parabolic dish + high-output magnetron = enemy satellites go boom. Why need a radio transmitter or fancy expensive satellite-killer missiles when you can just fry the enemy sats from the comfort of groundlevel?
By 'think', you mean 'leap immediately to a prejudice driven stance', right?
How else do you expect NASA to test its heavy lift capacity?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Waa, I hate those that comment on trolls
Do you think anyone cares?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Heard about LOFAR? It's the size of Europe. http://motherboard.tv/2011/6/2/motherboard-tv-the-biggest-telescope-on-earth--2
Believe it or not but not everything needs to devolve into political idealology pissing matches. The rise of the right causing the decline of the US science is a political slogan not a fact. Both the left and the right have their heads up their asses when it comes to anything these days let alone science. Judging by your comments you sound like one of those idealogy blinded neophytes who do nothing but moan about the future and get in the way of people trying to actually live a life instead of just endlessly complaining about it and then blaming others for your problems. There is no doubt that there are instances where budgets get smaller due to swings in the economy but it is usually cyclical in nature and doesn't warrant a blanket denounciation of the whole idea. For thing like the particle accelerators and observational arrays someone is footing the bill without looking to make a return an investment. I mean particle accelerators are nice big toys but they don't really contribute anything yet except for proving or disproving someones idea on how the universe is built but someone got the funding. They probably played the left and right against one another using the God particle as the reason they needed the money. The right was hoping they would find the god particle and the left was hoping they didn't and they got funding from both sides. If you want a Pure or Big Science discussion I am afraid your going to have to be a little more specific. Science and technology levels are usually advanced by necessity. The military industrial complex is the most well funded part of the government. I don't know if they have discovered any ground breaking scientific principle lately but they have sure been applying the ones we have. Just a few things the military has contributed to science and technology over the years: nuclear technology for both weapons and power, computing technology on several levels including the little Darpa project now known as the Internet. Orbital satellite applications for real life uses like GPS based guidance and navigation systems, all types of applied electomagnetic spectrum manipulation. Material science used in the stealth projects. The companies providing all of this are for the most part private and public corporations contracted to the governments military and with most of the scientists invloved in this type of work educated and doing their research in this country. To the military "disruptive tech" just means anything more than 5 years old. Also for every successful project or technology application there were probably several different attempts made at solving the same problems which fed research groups the funding to meet the demands.
Wtf is 'speach'? You really should go back to school.
But... but... if you lift four elephants at the same time, the Earth will fall off the back of the turtle!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why are you trying so desperately to turn any discussion about China into a political one?
Well, why not? Every discussion about the US turns into a long list of complaints about how either a) America sucks and has always sucked, or b) America is giving up its superpower status to the Chinese.
America is not "giving up" superpower status to anyone. China is merely rapidly catching up. This is a good thing; a lot of people may point at China and cry out about human rights abuses, etc. but the simple fact of the matter is that human rights abuses are more likely to happen where people are poverty stricken and trying to claw their way out of it. People with a comfortable quality of life are less likely to try to fuck everyone else over to make a buck. And as for any perceived danger from a military standpoint from China's rise into superpower status, only a lunatic would try to start a war between global powers today, and the Chinese don't even seem to go in for the beligerent swaggering that happenned in the cold war between Russia and the US.
The "America sucks" bit... well thats really up to Americans to fix if it is true. Nothing to do with China.
I think the main thing is that China has a shiny new toy and won't likely share with anyone. The geeks are jealous, as am I :)
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
Wrong. The simple fact is that when humans are too poor to protect their rights, they get abused. Typically more by the people organized enough to get relatively rich from abusing them. Which is why they abuse them.
Don't blame the poor for the human rights abuses when the evidence it's done to the poor by the less poor is everywhere.
--
make install -not war
America is not "giving up" superpower status to anyone. China is merely rapidly catching up.
I don't disagree with this, but there are many posters on Slashdot that do. I don't think of this as a zero-sum game; China getting richer and more powerful does not have to mean everyone else (or just the USA) getting poorer and weaker. I also think some aspects of China's rise are being overstated, as are some aspects of America's (supposed) decline. But that's not my point: it's clear that a large number of people think that the US is turning into a third world nation, and the Chinese can do no wrong. And every time there's an article about China doing something bad, at least half of the comments are bashing the US instead.
I'm not convinced that China's military ambitions are nothing to worry about, either. They'd be lunatics to start a fight with us or the Russians, but there are plenty of other small and relatively helpless nations to bully around, Taiwan being top of the list, and they appear to have even less conscience than the US when it comes to propping up dictatorships and looting third-world nations. But this shouldn't have anything to do with America either; I'd be perfectly content letting them make fools of themselves and become the arrogant assholes that everyone else hates. If the Chinese government continues to apply the same tone-deaf diplomacy and intolerance of criticism that they have recently, they'll be seeing their flag burned in capital cities around the world in just a few decades.
To be sure, we can both read, but the claim of the original Nazi (you?) was that it was parabolic "like ANY OTHER radio telescope", and Arecibo is famously not parabolic.