| Description: | Recently, the SKA Board met in Guiyang, southwest China. At the end of the meeting, our Chinese hosts organised a very special visit to the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), a new radio telescope now under construction and located in a natural hollow (karst) in Pingtang County, Guizhou Province. The telescope's active surface is composed of 4600 panels, providing a total effective aperture of ~ 70000 square metres. Due to the active surface, the telescope is able to cover quite a large fraction of sky - within 40 degrees of zenith. Operating at a frequency of 0.3 -3 GHz, one of the key science programmes will be the study and discovery of Pulsars. Currently the telescope is making great progress (see image above), and it is expected to be complete in about 2 years time. |
