Important radio telescopes
Filled-aperture telescopes
The largest single radio telescope in the world is the Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), located in a natural depression in Guizhou province in China. It was completed in 2016. FAST was designed to observe objects within 40° from the zenith.
FAST surpassed the 305-metre (1,000-foot) fixed spherical reflector operated by Cornell University at the Arecibo Observatory near Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Arecibo was used for planetary radar astronomy as well as for studying pulsars and other galactic and extragalactic phenomena, before the central platform collapsed in 2020.
The Russian RATAN-600 telescope (RATAN stands for Radio Astronomical Telescope of the Academy of Sciences), located near Zelenchukskaya in the Caucasus Mountains, has 895 reflecting panels, each 7.4 metres (24.3 feet) high, arranged in a ring 576 metres (1,890 feet) in diameter. Using long parabolic cylinders, standing reflectors, or dipole elements, researchers in Australia, France, India, Italy, Russia, and Ukraine have also built antennas with very large collecting areas.
The largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world is the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) located in Green Bank, West Virginia. This 110-by-100-metre (360-by-330-foot) off-axis radio telescope was completed in 2000 and operates at wavelengths as short as a few millimetres. The moving structure, which weighs 7.3 million kg (16 million pounds), points to any direction in the sky with an accuracy of only a few arc seconds. The secondary reflector is held by an off-axis support structure to minimize radiation from the ground and unwanted reflections from support legs. Each of the 2,004 surface panels that make up the parabolic surface is held in place by computer-controlled actuators that keep the surface accurate to a few tenths of a millimetre. The GBT is located in the National Radio Quiet Zone, which offers unique protection for radio telescopes from local sources of man-made interference.
Other large, fully steerable, filled-aperture radio telescopes include the Max Planck Institut für Radioastronomie 100-metre- (330-foot-) diameter antenna near Effelsberg, Germany; the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) 64-metre (210-foot) dish near Parkes; and the 76-metre (250-foot) Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank in England. These filled-aperture radio telescopes are used for atomic and molecular spectroscopy over a wide range of frequency and for other galactic and extragalactic studies.
Several smaller, more precise radio telescopes for observing at millimetre wavelength have been installed high atop mountains or other high elevations, where clear skies and high altitudes minimize absorption and distortion of the incoming signals by the terrestrial atmosphere. A 45-metre (148-foot) radio dish near Nobeyama, Japan, is used for observations at wavelengths as short as 3 mm (0.12 inch). The French-Spanish Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM) in Grenoble, France, operates a 30-metre (100-foot) antenna at an altitude of 2,850 metres (9,350 feet) on Pico Veleta in the Spanish Sierra Nevada for observations at wavelengths as short as 1 mm (0.04 inch). Several radio telescopes that operate at submillimetre wavelengths are located near the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, at elevations above 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) and on Mount Graham near Tucson, Arizona. The largest of these, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory, has a diameter of 15 metres (49 feet).