In a stunning landscape of jagged limestone hills in southwestern China, engineers are putting the finishing touches on a grand astronomy facility: a half-kilometer-wide dish nestled in a natural depression that will gather radio signals from the cosmos. The world’s largest radio telescope will catalog pulsars; probe gravitational waves, dark matter, and fast radio bursts; and listen for transmissions from alien civilizations.
Yet the architect of the tour de force is blasé about what his telescope might capture. “I’m really not very interested in science, I’m sorry to say,” says Nan Rendong, chief scientist and chief engineer of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) here. Colleagues insist he is joking, but there is no question that what has consumed 2 decades of his life— and is now wowing other astronomers—is engineering. “As a civil engineering feat, FAST is obviously amazing,” says Fred Lo, former director of the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It is not just FAST’s sheer size—it has more than twice the collecting area of the runner-up, the 305-meter dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. FAST is also breaking new ground in radio astronomy with a design that pulls a section of the spherical dish into a gradually moving paraboloid to aim at and track cosmic objects as Earth rotates, bringing the benefits of a tilting, turning antenna to a fixed dish. This innovation “is absolutely unique, nobody has ever done this before,” says Dick Manchester, a radio astronomer at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Sydney.
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