IT Home (IT之家) June 24 news, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), also known as China's Sky Eye, located in Pingtang County, Guizhou Province, completed the domestic replacement of the feed cabin's traction steel cables on June 22, and passed expert acceptance. The next day, FAST officially resumed astronomical observations.
The six steel cables replaced this time are core components of the FAST cable-driven system. The feed cabin, as the core component of China's Sky Eye that receives cosmic electromagnetic wave signals, weighs 30 tons, like the "eyeball" of the "giant sky eye".
These six steel cables are responsible for towing the feed cabin, enabling it to achieve real-time ultra-high-precision positioning within a range of 140 meters in height and 206 meters in diameter.
Each steel cable withstands hundreds of bending and pulse loads on a daily average, and must meet the stringent requirement of no breakage during 5 years of high-intensity operation. The domestically produced steel cables replaced this time have a total length of nearly 4,000 meters, with each weighing over 6 tons.
Since its completion and commissioning in 2016, the feed cabin wire ropes of FAST have always been imported products, with the first replacement carried out in 2021. However, the oil sludge that gradually seeped from the imported wire ropes during use affected the normal operation of the telescope.
To address this issue and achieve self-sufficiency in key components, the FAST Operation and Development Center officially initiated independent research and development of this component in January 2023.
After multiple rounds of technical breakthroughs, the R&D team completed 62,000 cycles of repeated pulley operation tests and 200,000 cycles of pulse fatigue tests on the sample ropes, achieving a domestication technology breakthrough in August 2025.
Yao Rui, head of the Measurement, Control and Engineering Department at the FAST Operation and Development Center, introduced that the replaced wire ropes this time achieved full-chain domestication, with all indicators meeting requirements from materials to processes and performance testing.
This domestic substitution not only solved the supply chain security issue, but the R&D cost is also about half that of foreign steel cables. Zhu Wenbai (朱文白), Technical Director of the Structure and Mechanics Department of FAST, stated that the project was originally planned to take 60 days, but was actually completed 10 days ahead of schedule, achieving zero accidents and zero damage throughout the process. IT Home (IT之家) noted that this cable replacement also provides replicable experience for other major scientific and technological infrastructure.
The year 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of the official completion and operation of China's Sky Eye (中国天眼). Over the past decade, FAST has discovered more than 1,200 pulsars, providing important technical support for the development of radio astronomy.
Related Reading:
Advertisement Notice: This article contains external jump links (including but not limited to hyperlinks, QR codes, command phrases, etc.) to convey more information and save screening time. The results are for reference only. All articles of IT Home (IT之家) include this notice.
This content is automatically aggregated by InertiaRSS (RSS Reader) for reading reference only. Original from — Copyright belongs to the original author.