Deep-dish peeper [The Big Picture]

Engineers working on the Five-hundredmeter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST, being built into a valley in Guizhou, China, hope to finish installing the radio telescope´s 4,450 triangular panels by next September. The panels, whose attitudes can be adjusted to form parabolas that point in different directions, will let scientists pick up faint signals originating more than 7 billion light-years away. To accommodate the data collected by the giant sensor-which will overtake the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico as the world´s largest and most sensitive radio telescope-a supercomputer capable of executing 1015 floatingpoint operations per second is being built to accompany it.