Good
ol’ ‘Murica may be ahead of China in development, GDP, and political
clout, but China just finished building the world’s largest radio
telescope and is now better-equipped at searching for aliens.
According
to Xinhua, about 300 “builders, experts, science fiction enthusiasts
and reporters” watched the installation of the Five-hundred-meter
Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, in the southern Chinese province
of Guizhou. The project took five years and $180 million to complete,
and the reflector covers the area of roughly 30 football fields.
FAST
is almost twice as large as the next biggest radio telescope, which is
in Puerto Rico. It will be used for early-stage research by Chinese
scientists for a couple years, and then be used more widely. FAST is
capable of detecting gravitational waves, pulsars and, eventually, amino
acids on other planets.
China is to launch an
“optical module” along with the under-construction space station, said
Zhang Yulin, Deputy to the National People’s Congress and Deputy
Minister of Central Military Commission Equipment Development
Department, on March 7, 2016. The “optical module” is similar to Hubble
Space Telescope, but the field of view is 300 times that of Hubble.
The
module would maintain a certain distance to orbit with the space
station. When suffers malfunction or needs maintenance, it will dock to
the space station and be operated by astronauts, Zhang said. This will
solve the problem Hubble has encountered, when NASA had to send up
astronauts particularly to repair it. This special design of China’s
space station makes in-orbit maintenance possible, and can thus bring
the numerous defunct satellites to life, Zhang said.
China has started assembling the world's largest radio telescope, which will have a dish the size of 30 football pitches when completed, state media reported as Beijing steps up its ambitions in outer space.
The five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) nestles in a bowl-shaped valley between hills in the southwestern province of Guizhou, images posted online show.
Technicians began attaching 4,450 triangular-shaped panels to the telescope's reflector on Thursday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
FAST will be the world's largest single-aperture telescope, it said, overtaking the Arecibo Observatory in the US territory of Puerto Rico, which is 305 metres (1000 feet) in diameter.
For years Chinese scientists have relied on "second hand" data collected by others in their research and the new telescope is expected to "greatly enhance" the country's capacity to observe outer space, Xinhua said.
"Having a more sensitive telescope, we can receive weaker and more distant radio messages," it cited Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, as saying.
"It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe."
