The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), located in a karst depression in Guizhou, is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, with a receiving area equivalent to 30 football fields. It is expected that FAST will maintain its world-class status for the next 20 to 30 years. With its innovation design, FAST has broken the 100-meter engineering limit for telescopes construction and created a new mode to build large radio telescopes.

Scientific Goals

1. Detect neutral hydrogen to the edge of the universe, reconstruct the images of the early universe;

2. Discover more than one thousand pulsars, establish a pulsar timing array, and participate in pulsar navigation
and gravitational wave detection in the future;

3. Join the International Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Network to obtain hyperfine structures of celestial bodies;

4. Perform high resolution radio spectral survey. Detect weak space signals;

5. Participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is a National Major Scientific Project built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Funding for the project has been provided by the National Development and Reform Commission. FAST is operated and managed by the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

We also suggest to cite the following papers on the design and construction, the commissioning and the preliminary scientific results of FAST.

1）Nan, R. 2006, Science in China: Physics, Mechanics and Astronomy, 49, 129. doi:10.1007/s11433-006-0129-9

2）Jiang, P., Yue, Y., Gan, H., et al. 2019, Science China Physics, Mechanics, and Astronomy, 62, 959502.doi:10.1007/s11433-018-9376-1

3）Jiang, P., Tang, N.-Y., Hou, L.-G., et al.\ 2020, Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20, 064. doi:10.1088/1674-4527/20/5/64

4）Qian, L., Yao, R., Sun, J., et al. 2020, The Innovation, 1, 100053. doi:10.1016/j.xinn.2020.100053