The £135 million ‘alien scanner’

China is preparing to unveil the world’s largest telescope which is due to be put into operation at the end of September.

Construction of the Five Hundred Metre Apeture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, has entered its final phase in Pingtang County, China’s Guizhou province, reports the People’s Daily Online.

The giant dish, which took five years to build, is the size of 30 football fields, measuring 1,640 feet in diameter. The Chinese authority relocated 8,000 residents from the area to make room for the ambitious equipment, built to boost the global hunt for extra-terrestrial life.

The provincial legislature passed a rule to guarantee the safe operation of the facility. The new rule will come into effect on September 25, according to the local Qiannan Observatory.

FAST requires radio silence within a 10-kilometre radius (six miles).

The new regulation bans activities such as hunting, wood gathering and land reclamation in the core area and also prohibits construction of irrelevant projects.

Those found constructing irrelevant projects will be fined 100,000 yuan (£11,249).

Construction of FAST began in March 2011 at a cost of 1.2 billion yuan (£134.9 million).

Once fully working, FAST aims to search for signals to understand the origin of the universe and also boost the global hunt for extra-terrestrial life.

The last of the 4,450 panels was put in place at the site on July 3 and a ceremony was held with balloons released from inside the telescope.

The telescope is set to be involved in the search for extra-terrestrial life. With its sensitive telescope, it can detect weaker radio signals.

It is also due to be used to study the Milky Way in more detail and look for the first shining stars.

Despite its end of September start-date, the telescope will need an adjustment period.

Peng Bo, director of the NAO Radio Astronomy Technology Laborator told reporters: ‘In the first two or three years after its completion, the telescope will undergo further adjustment, and during that period Chinese scientists will use it for early-stage research.

After that, it will be open to scientists worldwide’

According to Peng, scientists can also carry out observation in other cities such as Beijing, more than 2,000 kilometers from the telescope site.

Wang Qiming, chief technologist of the FAST project told reporters: ‘Most of the technology and materials are domestically made.

Among the 7 FAST receivers, five were domestically made and another two were co-produced by Chinese, Australian and American institutions.

Zheng Xiaonian, deputy head of the National Astronomical Observation under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which built the telescope says it will be the global leader for the next 10 to 20 years.

He told reporters that the project has the potential to search for more strange objects to better understand the origin of the universe and boost the global hunt for extra-terrestrial life.

The telescope is situated in a huge karst valley in Pingtang County, a rural area of Guizhou province, where a lot of residents are poor.

Residents within three miles of the site were forced to relocate and were given a 12,000 Yuan (£1,288) subsidy, with some getting extra financial support for housing.

It took the Chinese scientists as long as 17 years to find a hollow in the country large enough to accommodate the dish.

The new telescope will overtake the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to become the world’s largest radio telescope.  

‘FAST’ marks the biggest investment in astronomy by China as it continues to invest in its own space programme.

The country hopes to have its own space station by around 2020 and in the future conduct a manned mission to the moon.

The search for extra-terrestrial life is a worldwide project.

Last year, a new $100m project by Breakthough Initiative was launched using two of the world’s biggest telescopes to scour through one million of the closest stars to Earth for signals sent out by intelligent life.

The project will cover 10 times more sky and be 50 times more sensitive than previous searches.

The latest data collected by NASA and other space agencies suggests there could be as many as 40 billion potentially habitable planets in our galaxy.

Experts say that if a civilisation was broadcasting signals with the power of common aircraft radar from one of the 1,000 nearest stars to Earth, the telescopes used in the project could detect them.

Daily Mail

UM– USEKE.RW