Aerial photo taken on July 21, 2022 shows China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) under maintenance at sunset in southwest China's Guizhou Province. Located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in southwest China's Guizhou Province, FAST started formal operation in January 2020 and officially opened to the world on March 31, 2021. It is believed to be the world's most sensitive radio telescope. With FAST, scientists have identified over 660 new pulsars. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu)

China's five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) has discovered more than 740 new pulsars so far, said Jiang Peng, chief scientist of FAST and a deputy to the National People's Congress, at the deputies' passage of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress (NPC) on Tuesday.

FAST, also known as the "Eye of the Sky," is located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in Southwest China's Guizhou Province. FAST started formal operation in January 2020 and officially opened to the world on March 31, 2021. It is believed to be the world's most sensitive radio telescope.

Jiang said the reason for China to build such a huge telescope is that a larger telescope means a larger optical area and a stronger ability to detect weak signals, which can greatly expand the number of observable samples and help humans detect distant phenomena in the universe.

FAST has been in operation for nearly three years, and has made fruitful achievements, including the discovery of more than 740 pulsars, making it the most efficient pulsar discovery telescope in the world during the same period. 

In the past two years, FAST has covered almost all the scientific objectives it was designed for, including pulsar physics, fast radio bursts, including neutral hydrogen, galaxy formation and evolution, Jiang noted.

Jiang said his team had also experienced a disastrous risk,that is the fatigue performance of cable that has never been solved worldwide. Due to the special working mode of FAST, the 500-meter span cable network often changed frequently between the sphere and the paraboloid, resulting in long-term fatigue stress of up to 500 mpa, more than 2.5 times that of traditional regulations.

Jiang and his team improved almost all the key manufacturing processes after hundred times of failures and various experiments and tests around the country day and night. It took them nearly two years to finally develop the ultra-high fatigue resistance steel cable suitable for the finished product of FAST, which played a decisive role in the timely completion of the telescope.

However, Jiang said that although the "Eye of the Sky", the FAST, has given China a leading position in low - and medium-frequency radio, it should not be blindly optimistic as there is still a lot to work on in other wavelengths.

As a newly elected deputy to the National People's Congress, Jiang said it is his focus to maintain the core competitiveness of FAST in similar international devices and further improve its performance, adding that it is very important to ensure the enthusiasm of researchers, so that more outstanding scientific and technological talents will stay at the forefront of scientific research.

Next, Jiang and his team will push forward the planning and construction of the pilot array as soon as possible, solve some key technical problems, and continuously improve the performance of the telescope to maintain the leading edge of FAST.

Global Times