China’s 500m Telescope in Testing Phase

China has built the world’s largest radio telescope which happens to be a whopping 500m in diameter & made up of thousands of triangular panels. The telescope has just begun its intensive testing phase & received its first signals from space. It will take around 3 years to calibrate the instrument to make it fully operational & already astronomers can’t wait to use it.

The telescope is located in a vast natural crater in Guizhou Province in southwest China & destroys the previous record held by the Aricebo Observatory in Puerto Rico which measured 305m in diameter. China managed to construct it in just 5 years on a budget of $180 Million.

More About Arecibo Observatory: The Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope in the municipality of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. This observatory is operated by SRI International, USRA and UMET, under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). The observatory is the sole facility of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), which refers to the observatory, and the staff that operates it. From its construction in the 1960s until 2011, the observatory was managed by Cornell University.
The observatory’s 1000 foot (305 meter) radio telescope was the largest single-aperture telescope from its completion in 1963 until July 2016 when the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope was completed.