China starts building world's largest fully steerable radio telescope A 120-meter diameter radio telescope is under construction in China and, once built, will be the world’s largest fully steerable device of its kind, according to the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS). The purpose of the telescope is to help scientists better understand planets and asteroids, according to CAS. The ‘scope will …
Makes me think of "radar gun" by the bottle rockets
"Me and my partner go patrol car cruisin'
On the parking lots at the shopping malls
Scanning those dashes, those mirrors and visors
The little detectors that ruin it all
Johnny caught one on an '86 t-bird
Pull up slow just as close as I can
Milliwatt-seconds on maximum output
We'll dust that puppy with one small blast of my
Radar gun"
Maybe china should build a veritable RF "death ray"
Who needs a sat missiles with one of those?
the radio telescope's site in northeast China's Huadian, Jilin was chosen back in May, and preliminary work has already begun.
Why wasn't it announced and boasted about back then? Enquiring minds would like to know. Is this a Chinese cultural difference? Is it an Intelligence device like the seismographs the CIA planted in Mongolia and Tibet in the 1950s, or a bit of American style "Military Budget" Pork Barrelling?
The Space Surveillance Telescope in Australia became fully operational last year. Originally a research project at White Sands Missile Range, then transitioned "from a scientific research system to a military asset ready to support ongoing operations."
Note that although it is operated by the military, I have no idea if that is because the military wanted it, or because they got stuck with it. In the American system, "military" is a way of securing funding, which is why I wondered if China is the same.
I visited Effelsberg when I was young (several decades ago) and was suitably impressed. It is hard to imagine just how big this thing is. Unfortunately my career took a different turn, and I did astrophysics only as electives (and some lectures just as a guest, because back then nobody cared[1]).
[1] There used to be a time when as a student you basically had the right to attend any lecture you wished - there were some constraints when it came to labs, those were off limits, but lectures? Just go, enjoy, learn something new (provided the lecture theatre was big enough and you were not a nuisance. I did a couple of philosophy classes, astrophysics, musical theory, lots of maths and stats without doing exams, just because it was either enjoyable, interesting or neccessary for my theses (and thus interesting and actually fun). I wish I was bloody filthy rich, so I could stop working and study some more, hang out with scientists again...
I have no idea what it's good for, but it seems like a remarkable piece of engineering. Probably stunning to watch in action. I am curious why they didn't use a phased array -- a bunch of smaller antennae that do not themselves move, whose beam is steered electronically by altering the phase of the signals from/to the individual antennae. Not questioning their judgement, just curious about the reasoning.
UNESCO World Heritage site, and was used by the West to track Sputnik as it was the only thing capable at the time. Also used for Cold War early-detection capability, recieving images from the moon, and monitoring many early space missions.
And it's bloody beautiful, I used to drive past it several times a week, and on a lightly misty/frosty winter's morning, in the early morning winter sun, it was an absolute sight to behold. It's up there with Concorde in terms of beautiful engineering IMO.
A big phased array isn't necessarily simpler than a single large aperture. True, a phased array has no moving parts but each antenna element has to be separately wired up through its own RF channel with time delays, amplifiers, mixers etc. That's a lot of RF equipment to operate, maintain and buy in the first place.
Otherwise known as Tibet.
Seems like the CCP is looking to erase the name of the place in addition to its ancestral culture? I traveled there just before Covid, and it was heartbreaking to see the number of heavily armed police troopers surveilling religious festivals, or how newly built infrastructure defaced pristine landscapes (to which the new radiotelescope will do no favours also, I suspect)...
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