Tuesday 29 August 2017
Saving FAST from tourists : my solution
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), government statistics released this month show that in the first half of 2017, nearly four million tourists visited “FAST” (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope). Tourism officials estimate that 10 million tourists will visit the the highly-sensitive device this year. “That will be as many as the tourists to the Great Wall in Beijing,” the official announced. “Here we have a new wonder of the world.” China did such a great job of building something impressive, that its core function is at risk of being nullified.
I suggest building an identical but non-functional decoy telescope closer to a major city. With blackjack, and hookers... in fact, forget the decoy telescope !
http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-radio-telescope-has-a-massive-touris-1798389051
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"Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope". I see you guys are continuing your grand tradition of highly evocative names for telescopes.
ReplyDeleteJust be thankful it doesn't have some bizarre Chinese translation :
ReplyDeleteSuper Awesome Mega Giant Crazy Telescope
Actually, that's way better...
And they have yet to find someone to manage it all...
ReplyDeleteThat turns out not to be the case :
ReplyDeletehttp://shanghaiist.com/2017/08/07/laowai-not-wanted-to-run-telescope.php
ok.
ReplyDelete... I've been following the development of FAST. It's a bit of a mess. I do not understand why PRC decided to go with these enormous triangular reflector segments, crippling its ability to work at shorter wavelengths. FAST should have been designed by astronomers, not engineers.
ReplyDeleteThe limit on wavelength range might not be directly due to dish design. The largest deformations at the long wavelengths are of order 1 m, over an area 300 m across. For higher frequencies you'd need to do this with sub-mm precision. Dish design might help but you also need extreme accuracy on the tiedowns and an enormous amount of tension to beat the effects of thermal expansion (which over this large an area will vary from point to point). This may not be possible at all, regardless of dish design (it isn't yet clear how well it will even work at longer wavelengths).
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