Asia's largest radio telescope

Asia's largest radio telescope that it installed at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.

Set up to be used for gathering data from satellites and space probes, the gigantic telescope weighs 2,600 tones, measures 70 meters in height.

Equipped with a 3,317-sq.-meter antenna, which is 65 meters in diameter and can rotate 360 degrees, the telescope, which is situated at the foot of Sheshan Mountain of Songjiang district, has a celestial surveillance distance of more than 100 light-years.

It is the size of the antenna that's important. The greater the diameter the weaker the radio waves it can detect."

The new radio telescope can track and collect 8 different frequency bands from Earth satellites, lunar exploration satellites and deep space explorers.

Construction of the gigantic telescope has started at the end of 2010.

Only the United States, Italy and Germany have bigger radio telescopes.

Radio telescopes are different from optical telescopes as they make use of radio antennae to track and gather data from satellites and space explorers.

America's Karl Guthe Jansky, an engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL), had built the world's first radio antenna in the early 1930s.