FAST is the most advanced and carefully tuned radio telescope around the globe.
The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is now ready to scan the skies and is now operational in China.
FAST is the most advanced and carefully tuned radio telescope ever built by humans with a dish of 500 m across and is now the largest filled-in, single-dish radio telescope in the world.
Located in remote mountainous region in south-western China to ensure the area would be free from radio interference, the radio telescope was able to successfully observe a pulsar at a distance of 1,351 light years in a test last month.
Proposed by Chinese scientists in 1994, the project was approved by the government in 2007 and the construction of FAST was began in 2011 .Chinese government relocated almost 10,000 people before the construction started. The cost of the project was nearly 1.2 billion-yuan ($180 million).
The telescope will be used to study dark matter, gravitational waves, pulsars, and fast radio bursts. The designers expect it to be the largest and most advanced radio telescope in the world for at least 10-20 years.
With an area equal to 30 soccer fields, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier could easily float in the 500 meter dish from bow to stern, with room to spare.