Construction of the core array of China’s Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) began on Wednesday, highlighting the country’s growing potential in global radio astronomy research.
As a proposed extension of FAST, the core array integrates 24 40-meter secondary antennas located within five kilometers of the FAST site, said Jiang Peng, deputy director of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This network, designed by China, will combine the unprecedented sensitivity of FAST with high angular resolution, surpassing the capabilities at similar frequencies of next-generation networks around the world.
The FAST core network is expected to be completed and put into service in 2027.
