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by ourmandave 3644 days ago
The "Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope", or FAST, is the size of 30 football fields...

This thing will look adorable when the Square Kilometre Array comes on line in 2020 and starts pumping many Petabits of data per second.

https://www.skatelescope.org/signal-processing/

Oh look! They're hiring...

https://www.skatelescope.org/people-contacts/vacancies/

1 comments

Single-dish of this size has great sensitivity: it's a huge photon bucket. It doesn't need a long time on-source to make an image. So it is "FAST".

A telescope array is basically a huge structure with lots of holes in it. As the Earth rotates, the elements of the array sweep out arcs. That fills in some gaps. So even with a relatively bright source, you might need to wait a while before you fill in enough to be able to discern the details. So a big, single dish is "FAST".

Array elements are spread over thousands of meters. You get great resolution, like a microscope on the sky. But you also get all these diffraction patterns. Since you know the shape of your array, you can mostly solve for this, but it's a pain in the ass.