Chinas FAST telescope nearing completion

[Asmodean]

My hastily-found source in English focuses on the relocation of people in 5 kilometer range of the telescope rather than the science behind it, yet it's a fascinating project. Maybe they will not find aliens, but imagine what else one might discover with a dish like that..!

Work on the 1.2bn yuan (£127m) Fast (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) project began in the south-western province of Guizhou in 2011 and is expected to be completed by September. (Continued at source)

Source: www.theguardian.com

[Tank]

This is rather odd. It's well known that super dishes like this are not the best way to construct radio telescopes. Far more effective is to build smaller dishes and create a radio interfereometer  which is what everybody else has done since the completion of the Arecibo observatory. This is 1960s technology. It's got to be a trophy project. What a stupid waste of money.

[Asmodean]

It is a trophy project. A dish array does provide advantages over megadishes, however, in the world of parabolic surfaces and utilization thereof in observation, bigger is, in theory, better.

I'm not writing off Das Überdish until I see it fail.