Global Times reports a plan to relocate of thousands of people away from the site of the world’s largest radio telescope in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province said a source in charge of the project. Around 9,100 people from 2,029 families living within 5 kilometers of the radio telescope will be relocated by the end of September, reported the Xinhua News Agency.
“The telescope will not send out electromagnetic waves and there will be no radiation, and it’s wrong to say the relocation was caused by health concerns for nearby residents,” a source in charge of the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, told the Global Times on Thursday, “Simply speaking, the relocations were not about forcing people away from the telescope, but are due to the telescope’s need to ‘hide from’ electromagnetic interference produced by human and industrial civilization.”
The authorities specifically choose a site for the telescope in an underdeveloped area with little electromagnetic interference, and its location in a valley surrounded by mountains will also cut down on electronic interference, he noted.
Construction of the FAST project began in March 2011 and cost 1.2 billion yuan ($184 million). The telescope, whose dish is the size of more than 30 soccer fields, will be the world’s largest of its kind, overtaking Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters in diameter.
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