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November 9th, 2008 at 8:57 am

LAMOST: World’s Biggest Fixed Spectrometer Telescope

LAMOST:  World’s Biggest Fixed Spectrometer Telescope 

LAMOST 

National Astronomical Observatories from Chinese Academy of Sciences has completed their long awaited project “The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope or LAMOST”.

Inspired by previous telescope Sloan Digital Sky Survey, it was build at a cost of $34.40 million. A diameter of 50 meters, with a total height over 58 meters, that is equivalent of two-story building of large-scale astronomical observation equipment, and with a gross weight over 700 tons, LAMOST is world’s biggest fixed spectrometer telescope. King of the spectrum is located 170 kilometers north-east of Beijing, the Chinese capital. Acording to Professor Donald York:

“LAMOST has 4,000 fibers at a shot, 5.5 times that of SDSS and a bigger advantage over anything else

Instead of providing images, it just performs spectroscopic operations. Starlight captured by a segmented mirror is transmitted towards another mirror six meters across through a 20-m long tunnel. However, the performance of telescope is yet to be tested, which will prove, how worthy it is for further space exploration.

Via Gizmowatch

 

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