The world’s biggest radio telescope is finally open to international scientists

Photo: The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). Photo credit: Jeff Dai / Stocktrek Images on Alamy. Article by Sarah Scoles / Undark. Popular Science – April 21, 2021.

With the loss of Arecibo, collaboration with China becomes all the more important for space research.

In the hills of China’s Guizhou province, a natural rock bowl cradles the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. This instrument, called FAST—the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope—is, as its name suggests, 500 meters, or about 1,640 feet, across, a size that helps scientists detect more distant and fainter objects. And in late March, FAST began accepting scientific proposals from international astronomers for the first time. […]

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