The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) passed national acceptance and is taking pilot cycle of 'Shared-Risk' observations. The 19-beam receiver covering 1.05-1.45 GHz was used for most of these observations. The electronics gain fluctuation of the system is better than 1\% over 3.5 hours, enabling enough stability for observations. Pointing accuracy, aperture efficiency and system temperature are three key parameters of FAST. The measured standard deviation of pointing accuracy is 7.9′′, which satisfies the initial design of FAST. When zenith angle is less than 26.4∘, the aperture efficiency and system temperature around 1.4 GHz are ∼ 0.63 and less than 24 K for central beam, respectively. The measured value of these two parameters are better than designed value of 0.6 and 25 K, respectively. The sensitivity and stability of the 19-beam backend are confirmed to satisfy expectation by spectral HI observations toward N672 and polarization observations toward 3C286. The performance allows FAST to take sensitive observations in various scientific goals, from studies of pulsar to galaxy evolution.
@article{arxiv.2002.01786,
title = {The Fundamental Performance of FAST with 19-beam Receiver at L Band},
author = {Peng Jiang and Ning-Yu Tang and Li-Gang Hou and Meng-Ting Liu and Marko Krco and Lei Qian and Jing-Hai Sun and Tao-Chung Ching and Bin Liu and Yan Duan and You-Ling Yue and Heng-Qian Gan and Rui Yao and Hui Li and Gao-Feng Pan and Dong-Jun Yu and Hong-Fei Liu and Di Li and Bo Peng and Jun Yan and FAST Collaboration},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.01786},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
29 pages, 28 figures, accepted by Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics