World's largest telescope

The world's largest radio telescope - five hundred metres in diameter - has just been completed and is now in the preliminary stages of testing which will take around three years to commission and fine tune.

The project itself has taken over fifteen years so far - ten years to find a suitable location as it needed a natural crater, and five and a half years to construct. The dish itself is made up of thousands of individual triangular sections each of which can be angled so as to aim the dish at various locations in the galaxy. A remarkable achievement by the Chinese.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37453933

Re: World's largest telescope

Fascinating

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When you think how far science has come since the introduction of the Mark1 Lovell at Jodrell Bank in 57.

At just under 80m was the biggest steerable telescope in the World.

I live only a few miles from here and it still fascinates me every time I pass.

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Good old Jodrell Bank - instrumental in the fledgling space exploration in the 1960's and the only one capable of tracking the moon landing of Apollo 11 with any accuracy.

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Except of course it didn't, the Australian telescope at Honeysuckle Creek in the ACT did.

But here is a picture I took in 1969

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...and here is a picture taken in the PO Tower in July 1969

If you look closely at the monitor you can see the American helicopter about to pick up the Apollo 11 astronauts after they landed in the ocean.

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It's nice to see some things haven't changed(apart from vans that is)
The unspoilt views from the roads.
Not a house in sight across gorgeous green belt land, not even a Wimpey, just a bloody massive telescope

I ride my bike along those roads Bruce and everything is the same, almost 50 years later.

Btw. I was 5 when that photo was taken.

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Exciting stuff. I would loved to have worked somewhere like that.

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I remember earlier in the year hearing about the Square Kilometer Array on the radio.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is a large multi radio telescope project aimed to be built in Australia and South Africa. If built, it would have a total collecting area of approximately one square kilometer.[2][3] It would operate over a wide range of frequencies and its size would make it 50 times more sensitive than any other radio instrument. It would require very high performance central computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the current global Internet traffic.[4] It should be able to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than ever before.

With receiving stations extending out to distance of at least 3,000 kilometers (1,900 mi) from a concentrated central core, it would exploit radio astronomy's ability to provide the highest resolution images in all astronomy. The SKA would be built in the southern hemisphere, in sub-Saharan states with cores in South Africa and Australia, where the view of the Milky Way Galaxy is best and radio interference least.[5]

Construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in 2018 for initial observations by 2020, but the construction budget is not secured at this stage. The SKA would be built in two phases, with Phase 1 (2018-2023) representing about 10% of the capability of the whole telescope.[6][7] Phase 1 of the SKA was cost-capped at 650 million euros in 2013, while Phase 2's cost has not yet been established.[8] The headquarters of the project are located at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, in the UK.[9][10]

Re: World's largest telescope

Hi

Yes, all well and good, but can it find my car keys?