China Builds World's Biggest Fixed Spectrometer Telescope

[cosmictraveler]

Chinese researchers' long dream of building a facility better but still relying on the technology used on a national scale for astronomical search purposes has finally come true. Housed in a building that looks like a nuclear missile silo and a messed up PI symbol lies their latest achievement, the Large sky Area Multi-Object fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST). It was developed on a 235 million yuan ($34.4 million) budget. The best Chinese telescope constructors have joined their efforts to design the facility.

Inspired by the former champion of space survey, Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), LAMOST is built on a technology that tops SDSS' possibilities by more than twice; unlike its predecessor, it is not designed to provide images, but only to perform spectroscopic operations. It comprises 4,000 optical fibers that monitor space at the same time, decoding the incoming light into massive amounts of data. During observation, the dome is removed, while the starlight is captured by a segmented mirror larger than four meters, transmitted through the 20-m long tunnel towards another mirror six meters across.

http://news.softpedia.com/images/news2/China-build-World-039-s-Biggest-Fixed-Spectrometer-Telescope-2.jpg



http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=22&q=http://news.softpedia.com/news/China-build-World-039-s-Biggest-Fixed-Spectrometer-Telescope-97439.shtml&ei=209BSdyTHqGbtweIoo3LCA&usg=AFQjCNEeHS0wNR3sQU1sZcu3bqX0pn7qoQ

[At World's End]

Interesting. What might be the objective of this new project?

[cosmictraveler]

Lets say that before astronomers could only view 800 things at one time that were going on somewhere , now they can see over 4,000 things happening so it gives them a better way to observe the universe.