The Qitai Radio Telescope
Abstract
This study presents a general outline of the Qitai radio telescope (QTT) project. Qitai, the site of the telescope, is a county of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, located in the east Tianshan Mountains at an elevation of about 1800 m. The QTT is a fully steerable, Gregorian type telescope with a standard parabolic main reflector of 110 m diameter. The QTT has adopted an um-brella support, homology-symmetric lightweight design. The main reflector is active so that the deformation caused by gravity can be corrected. The structural design aims to ultimately allow high-sensitivity observations from 150 MHz up to 115 GHz. To satisfy the requirements for early scientific goals, the QTT will be equipped with ultra-wideband receivers and large field-of-view mul-ti-beam receivers. A multi-function signal-processing system based on RFSoC and GPU processor chips will be developed. These will enable the QTT to operate in pulsar, spectral line, continuum and Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) observing modes. Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and radio frequency interference (RFI) control techniques are adopted throughout the system design. The QTT will form a world-class observational platform for the detection of low-frequency (nanoHertz) gravitational waves through pulsar timing array (PTA) techniques, pulsar surveys, the discovery of binary black-hole systems, and exploring dark matter and the origin of life in the universe.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2310.07163,
title = {The Qitai Radio Telescope},
author = {Na Wang and Qian Xu and Jun Ma and Zhiyong Liu and Qi Liu and Hailong Zhang and Xin Pei and Maozheng Chen and Richard N. Manchester and Kejia Lee and Xingwu Zheng and Hans J. Kärcher and Wulin Zhao and Hongwei Li and Dongwei Li and Martin Süss and Matthias Reichert and Zhongyi Zhu and Congsi Wang and Mingshuai Li and Rui Li and Ning Li and Guljaina Kazezkhan and Wenming Yan and Gang Wu and Lang Cui and Ming Zhang and Haitao Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.07163},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
12 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy