Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2016

INSTRUMENTS More than 9000 resi- dents were moved to no less than 5 km of dis- tance from the place that would house FAST, and this mainly to avoid that telephone devices and other technological products for private use could pollute the com- petence frequency of the great instrument. After the area has been “freed”, a ceremony was held in December 2008 to lay the first stone, although the ac- tual construction of the radio telescope only began in March 2011. Thanks to the choice of a valley with a shape very similar to the basin designed for FAST, the excava- tion works of superfluous material were relatively quick and, all considered, the im- mense work was completed in a short pe- riod of time, as usual for the Chinese population. 5 and a half years after the begginning of the work, in the late morning of the first Sunday of July, the last panel of the disk was placed, an operation that lasted about forty minutes, approximately the same aver- T hree snap- shots of the installation of the 4450 aluminum panels on the network of steel cables. By work- ing at a fast pace, the Chinese engi- neers have posed about twenty panels a day. [NAOC, Xinhua, China Photo Press, China Rex Features] age time required for the laying of each of a total of 4450 alu- minum panels, al- most all triangular- shaped and slightly curved, with sides of 11 meters (177 in- stead have rather dif- ferent shapes). All the panels are fixed on a cable- mesh structure con- sisting of thousands of steel cable at- tached to each other by sturdy clamps, and the perimeter of the entire structure is fixed to a colossal cir-