China Tianyan, the world's largest radio telescope, will open its doors to astronomers around the world from March 31, Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.
The call is for free-application projects with no more than 100 hours of observing time for a single application, and it is expected that about 10 percent of the observing time will be allocated to scientists worldwide or about 450 hours.
The National Astronomical Observatory of China will announce the results of the review on July 20 and begin scheduling observations in August.
The five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, nicknamed China Tianyan, is the world's largest filled-aperture radio telescope.
Since its opening for domestic operation in January 2020, this research infrastructure with independent intellectual property rights has discovered more than 300 pulsars and made a breakthrough in fast radio bursts.
Tianyan literally means Eye of the Sky. It is a radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression, a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou, southwest China.
This project is a major national science and technology infrastructure consisting of several parts, such as an active reflector system, a feed support system, a measurement, and control system, a receiver, and a terminal, and an observation base.
The reflective surface is composed of 4,450 reflective units with a total area of 250,000 square meters, which is equivalent to 30 standard football fields.
It uses a 30-ton feed tank to be controlled by 6 steel cables and can be positioned in real-time within a range of 206 meters at an altitude of 140 meters.
It can see more distant and faint celestial bodies. The celestial bodies that can be found in China Tianyan can provide coordinates to a 100-meter radio telescope, and the other party can also see them in 9 minutes.
The accuracy is very high. The measurement angle on a 500-meter scale is accurate to 8 arc seconds. The positioning accuracy of 10 mm requires a maximum of 3.8 mm.
China Tianyan, world's largest radio telescope, begins search for extraterrestrial civilizations
