The Qitai Radio Telescope

This study presents a general outline of the Qitai radio telescope (QTT) project. Qitai, the site of the telescope, is a county of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, located in the east Tianshan Mountains at an elevation of about 1800 m. The QTT is a fully steerable, Gregorian type telescope with a standard parabolic main reflector of 110 m diameter. The QTT has adopted an um-brella support, homology-symmetric lightweight design. The main reflector is active so that the deformation caused by gravity can be corrected. The structural design aims to ultimately allow high-sensitivity observations from 150 MHz up to 115 GHz. To satisfy the requirements for early scientific goals, the QTT will be equipped with ultra-wideband receivers and large field-of-view mul-ti-beam receivers. A multi-function signal-processing system based on RFSoC and GPU processor chips will be developed. These will enable the QTT to operate in pulsar, spectral line, continuum and Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) observing modes. Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and radio frequency interference (RFI) control techniques are adopted throughout the system design. The QTT will form a world-class observational platform for the detection of low-frequency (nanoHertz) gravitational waves through pulsar timing array (PTA) techniques, pulsar surveys, the discovery of binary black-hole systems, and exploring dark matter and the origin of life in the universe.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronom

Fault Tolerance for Active Surface System with Actuator Faults

The QiTai Radio Telescope (QTT) will be equipped with the active surface adjustment system (ASAS) to correct the main reflector deformation caused by environmental loading. In order to guarantee the stability and performance of the active surface system under fault conditions, it is necessary to adopt the fault-tolerant method when actuator faults have occurred. In this paper, a fault control method based on actuator faults weighting is proposed to solve the active surface fault control problem. According to the coordinates of the adjustable points of the panels corresponding to the faulty actuators, a new paraboloid is fitted by a weighted health matrix, and the fitting surface is taken as the target to adjust the surface shape