According to CAS, the goal of the telescope is to help scientists better understand planets and asteroids.
The telescope will receive electromagnetic waves from celestial bodies and send its own energy into the sky to allow accurate measurement of distances between Earth and other planets.
Other radio telescopes with this capability include the defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.
According to CAS, the site for the radio telescope in the northeastern Chinese city of Huadian, Jilin, was selected in May and preliminary work has already begun. Some of the foundations have been completed, and installation, setup and testing of the telescope is expected to be completed in 2028.
This date coincides with the estimated completion dates for the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO). Some elements are already operational, but the end of construction will not occur until 2028 or 2029.
While the telescope in Jilin is a significantly larger single device, SKAO is an ensemble of over 130 000 antennas in Australia and another 200 in South Africa. As its name suggests, its antennas cover a total area of one square kilometre.
The Five Hundred Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), located in China, is currently the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world. It was completed in 2016, but due to lengthy testing and calibration, it will not become operational until 2020.
FAST's 500-meter dish, while larger than the upcoming radio telescope in Jilin, is not fully steerable. The antenna is located in a natural hole, giving it a mostly fixed orientation. It is designed to operate using a technique known as active surface control. It can be adjusted using a set of movable panels that allow some flexibility in observing different regions of the sky.
Unlike the 305-metre Arecibo Observatory, which was a radar-based facility, FAST was designed primarily for radio astronomy - including the study of cosmic objects such as pulsars, galaxies and black holes. Its dish allows incredibly faint radio signals to be collected from deep space.
Both the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and the Effelsberg radio telescope in Germany are fully steerable and have a dish diameter of 100 meters.
CAS revealed that China is currently building smaller but fully steerable radio telescopes at sites such as the Changbai Mountain Protection and Development Zone in Jilin. | BGNES
