It’s named the “Five-hundred-meters Aperture Spherical Telescope” or FAST. Like Aricebo, the dish is not steerable. Because it is fixed, staring straight up, it can only observe what Earth’s orbital rotations bring into view.
Thank you.
It’d be interesting to see what a space-based synthetic aperture telescope could do on a multi-kilometer frame. Shouldn’t be too long before we could do it relatively cheaply - though it might also be a collection of steerable sub-units.
Scientists will then begin debugging and trial observation of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), said Zheng Xiaonian, deputy head of the National Astronomical Observation (NAO) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which built the telescope.
Doh!
Like all our recon, GPS and communication satellites?