Today on "Impossible Engineering,"
the FAST telescope,
the largest radio telescope on the planet.
That is an incredible piece of engineering!
A record-breaking telescope of astronomical proportions...
Those sensors can be located to within 1 centimeter
in this 500-meter dish.
...And the innovative pioneers of the past...
Believe it or not, these are sound mirrors.
...Who made the impossible possible.
... Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by discovery communications
Guizhou province, southwest China...
since the dawn of time,
humanity has sought to unravel
the mysteries of the universe.
And physicist Andrew Steele is here,
seemingly in the middle of nowhere,
to see how we just might reveal the clues of the cosmos.
Tucked into a natural basin
sits one of the world's newest
and most advanced space exploration devices.
That is an incredible piece of engineering!
The 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope,
or "fast" for short,
is the largest and most sensitive
single-dish radio telescope in the world.
It can pick up radio waves
from billions of light-years away
and will help to unlock the secrets of our universe.
The $180-million FAST telescope
is probing the cosmos more deeply
than any radio telescope before it.
Completed in 2016,
it detects the radio waves
emitted by objects in deep space,
allowing astronomers to see what's out there
on a truly epic scale.
This massive 1,600-foot diameter antenna
consists of a spider's web of 10,000 steel cables
weighing nearly 1,800 tons.
These support a sprawling 4,450 triangular panels
which form the dish itself.
And at the center, suspended
from six 330-foot-high towers,
hangs a 33-ton receiver cabin.
This incredible device collects data
from billions of light-years away.
But for astronomer and one of fast's creators Peng Bo,
building a project on such an astronomical scale
is no easy task.
The first problem engineers had when constructing this thing
is its sheer size.
Fast is vast.
And to put that into some kind of context,
the previous world's largest radio telescope
was 300 meters across.
This thing is 500 meters.
That's over twice the area
for collecting those faint radio waves
coming down from the sky.
So how can fast's engineers
build a receiving dish of such epic proportions?
This would be impossible
without history's greatest innovators.
Ah!
Since humanity emerged from the caves
and began building homes... Ohh.
Hurdy, gurdy, gurdy.
...Most designs have had one thing in common...
- Fantastisk. - Oh, I say, simply marvelous.
...Four walls and a roof.
Hey!
Aah!
Oh, crikey.
But during America's postwar housing shortage,
architect Richard Buckminster Fuller
bucked the traditional house,
creating something revolutionary.
Tasked in the 1940s with creating a quick
and cost-effective method for building homes,
he developed the geodesic dome house.
In Cornwall, England,
science communicator Kate Mulcahy
is getting a bird's-eye view of the geodesic concept.
Behind me is an icon in conservation
and a feat of modern engineering.
These are the biomes which are part of the Eden project.
They're actually covered in a really intricate pattern
of hexagons and Pentagons with sharp angles and corners.
This geometric feat is not just about looking good.
It actually has a really important purpose.
Its designers needed to house
a variety of plants from different climates,
including the tropics.
Measuring 55 meters high,
100 meters wide, and 200 meters long
surrounding an area the size of 34 football pitches,
the rainforest biome is actually large enough
to house the tower of London.
So how can a geodesic dome cover such a vast amount of space?
A geodesic dome is a spherical structure
which is made of triangular elements
that form a network of circles
to create the surface of the sphere.
But the real strength of Fuller's design
was that it was made with a series of triangles.
Now, the triangle, with its fixed angles,
is actually the strongest two-dimensional shape.
Now, I want to show you exactly how this works
by building one of these using only these.
As I'm joining the triangles together,
they begin to form the shell of my structure.
And the rigidity of each triangle
begins to form a tremendous strength.
It's only when this final piece gets added
that the strength comes together.
Now I have a self-supporting structure.
And whatever stress I put on it
gets distributed evenly across the whole structure.
Fuller's genius becomes clear when scaling up.
The bigger the dome gets, the stronger it becomes,
the only human-made structure to do such a thing.
But how strong is it?
It's certainly very light, easy to pick up.
The only way to actually test this is for me to climb on top.
So...
Yeah. It's very strong.
So we see Fuller's design definitely works,
just like the biomes behind me.
Oh, amazing.
Even more incredibly,
when a sphere's diameter is doubled,
its surface area quadruples,
creating eight times the volume
with very little surface area.
This results in less materials and less-expensive homes.
Wow.
It's an amazing piece of engineering
if you want to build something that's very big,
that's very light, and that's very strong.
To create the world's largest uninterrupted dish,
fast's engineers are super-sizing
Fuller's geodesic dome concept
and flipping it on its head.
To take on this gargantuan challenge, workers construct
a 1-mile-long steel girder ring,
forming the outer perimeter of the dish.
Six 300-foot-high towers surround it
and support a 33-ton feed cabin.
This houses the all-important receiver
designed to capture even the faintest
of galactic radio waves.
After just five years of construction,
on July 3, 2016, the engineers lower
the last aluminum triangular panel into place.
This is just an absolutely awesome structure.
It's epic in scale.
Those aluminum panels are perforated
to keep them, firstly, lightweight,
secondly, to allow the rain through
and, finally, to allow the light through.
That means the plants can grow on the surface underneath.
And their roots can get down into the soil
and provide a bit of support for this truly enormous structure.
But to create the most precise telescope ever built,
fast's engineers must draw on the pioneers from the past...
Suddenly, the biggest threat came from the sky.
Defending against enemy aircraft was virtually impossible.
...To make the impossible possible.
The FAST telescope...
hidden in the mountains of southwest China,
it's the largest radio telescope on the planet.
Fast is massive.
And that's ideal for collecting those weak radio signals
from billions of light-years across the universe.
But it also presents engineers with a big problem.
Fast is so huge, it has to be fixed to the ground.
Smaller radio telescopes have a receiver
fixed at the center of the dish
to collect reflected radio waves.
The dish rotates
to point at the exact area under observation.
But the fast dish is too enormous to do that.
As you can see from this rather nifty little scale model,
you can't just tilt the whole landscape
to point fast at a particular galaxy
you might be interested in studying.
So how do you make a telescope the size of fast
point at different places in the sky?
To resolve this conundrum,
the team must draw on history's greatest innovations.
Since classical times, a shape known as a paraboloid
has been treasured for its reflecting qualities.
Bashy, bashy.
In 3rd-century B.C.,
legend has it that Greek mathematician Archimedes
used parabolic mirrors
to concentrate the sun's rays
and set fire to invading Roman ships.
- Aah! - We'll call it a ray gun.
Uh, okay, boss.
17th-century astronomers
searched the sky with new clarity
by adding paraboloid mirrors to their optical telescopes.
Oh, boring.
And early lighthouses used them
to beam their warnings out to sea.
Oy, turn the light on.
High above the Kent coast in Southern England,
physicist Suzie Sheehy
is investigating an historic moment
when engineers began using parabolic mirrors
on a giant scale.
World war I was the first major conflict
involving aircraft.
And even though it was a new technology,
it had a major impact.
Suddenly, the biggest threat to security came from the sky.
Defending against enemy aircraft was virtually impossible,
as it relied purely on sight.
That's because both night skies
and cloudy days obscured incoming enemy aircraft.
And the solution to that problem
is these incredible structures.
These monolithic structures once peppered the shoreline
of Great Britain.
Believe it or not, these are sound mirrors.
Pioneering acoustic physicist William Sansome Tucker
designed these sound mirrors not to see,
but to hear approaching enemy aircraft.
Here at Denge are some of the finest
examples of Tucker's work.
And they're each a slightly different size
and have different structures.
So, the smallest one points straight out.
And it collects sound waves that are slightly lower
and slightly nearer.
The middle-size one is pointed further up towards the sky.
And then finally, over there is a 200-foot wall.
They're all based on a curved surface known as a paraboloid.
And when the sound waves come in
and bounce off of the paraboloid,
they're all focused down to one point at the center
called the focal point.
Sound waves hit a parabolic reflector at different places.
When those reflected waves meet at the focal point,
the sound amplifies.
I'm going to attempt to recreate an early-warning scenario.
So I'm going to place this microphone at the focal point.
So... About there.
All of this area is going to collect sound waves
and focus them down to the center
and amplify the sound.
So, I've got this setup here
with a laptop connected to the microphone
at the center of the parabolic reflector,
which is about 100 feet away.
And all the sound waves are gonna bounce off that reflector
and be collected by that microphone.
And that's represented by the blue curve here.
And the red trace is a control microphone.
And it's placed off to one side.
So I'm just going to have a quick listen.
Yeah, at the moment, nothing much is happening.
The curves are the same.
I can't really see any difference.
But as aircraft approach from many miles away
and from different points in the sky,
the parabolic sound mirrors
let sound technicians hear the engines
in time to alert air defenses.
So, I can start to hear something.
Can definitely hear a plane propeller.
So, I can definitely see that the blue curve
is above the red one in this middle region here.
And historically, we could use these sound mirrors
to detect airplanes about 15 or 20 miles away.
To detect radio waves from different areas in the sky
without moving the telescope,
fast's engineers are revolutionizing
the concept of multiple parabolic sound mirrors
with a single but dynamic 1,600-foot-diameter dish.
This thing is enormous.
Down here, you can see just how ambitious
this project really was.
It's absolutely enormous.
We're driving down into the bowels of the telescope.
It's pretty unbelievable that once,
it was just a little farm in this cast depression.
And now it's this incredible structure.
From down here, you can really see what's unique about fast.
It uses these actuators to distort the dish.
It's got what's called an active reflector.
And these are used to tug this huge surface
into the exact right shape to collect radio waves.
They use 2,000 of these actuators
to pull that dish down
into that perfect parabolic shape
to get the sharpest possible images of the sky.
This system of actuators
lets astronomers point each individual panel
at any area of the sky they wish,
transforming this big, apparently static dish
into a dynamic moving reflector.
That is the sound of this actuator starting up.
And believe it or not, it actually is moving
very, very slowly, about a millimeter every second.
These actuators allow engineers to move 300 meters
of the dish out of that 500-meter total.
And that gives you a lot of flexibility.
It allows you to look at different parts of the sky.
So rather than just looking straight up,
fast can actually scan a region of 40 degrees
either side of that so-called zenith.
This really is an incredibly innovative solution
that they've come up with here at fast.
But distorting the dish into a paraboloid
is just the first step
toward unveiling the mysteries of the universe.
To make the most powerful radio telescope on earth,
engineers must look to the past...
Oh, my god.
I just took off an aeroplane!
...To create more impossible engineering.
Built deep in the mountaintops of southwest China,
engineers have created the most powerful terrestrial tool
in space exploration, the FAST telescope.
Scientists wanted to create the world's largest telescope
to carry on our global quest
to understand what's out there in the universe.
And that meant they needed to create a huge dish.
Even though it can't turn,
engineers can alter fast's enormous parabolic dish surface
to collect radio waves
from different areas of the sky.
But this dynamic element
also poses a significant problem.
As the reflectors change angles,
the central focal point also changes.
This is the sensor cabin,
and it's right at the heart of fast.
Once the radio waves have been collected by this giant dish,
they're all bounced into here.
Now, in order to track a galaxy moving across the sky,
you're going to have to keep moving this
to keep it in exactly the right spot
to look at the object you're interested in.
So how do you move a 33-ton receiver cabin
dangling around 300-feet high,
and still capture radio waves
with pinpoint accuracy?
To accomplish the impossible,
fast's engineers must look to the past.
They find inspiration in an innovation from 1964,
when American engineer Klaus Cappel was developing
a realistic flight simulator.
And science communicator Kate Mulcahy
is at l3 simulation and training in London, England,
to get underneath Cappel's invention.
What flight simulation really needed
was to recreate the true experience
of the sensation of flight.
And here they are.
Each of these machines weighs over 14 tons
and costs a whopping 12 million pounds.
These cutting-edge machines
are some of the most advanced flight Sims
available today.
You can see here, there are six hydraulic Jacks or actuators.
They're positioned in pairs
and move independently from each other.
And that allows this motion platform
such versatile movement.
By employing six hydraulic Jacks in tandem,
Cappel created what's called a motion platform,
the forerunner to modern flight simulators.
Oh, my god.
I just took off an aeroplane!
I can't see. What do you do?
Just like a real plane,
these Jacks allow the motion platform
to move the cabin
in what's known as six degrees of freedom.
This includes three linear movements,
surge, or forward and backwards,
heave, or up and down,
and sway, or left and right...
Oh, my gosh.
...And three rotations, pitch, roll,
and yaw.
This is a crash, surely, surely.
It's amazing to think
that thanks to these six hydraulic Jacks
sitting underneath this crazy simulator,
countless lives have probably been saved.
With its dynamic range of movement
and its pinpoint accuracy,
these motion platforms have opened up
a world of possibility
across a diverse range of applications.
The engineering team at fast
is raising this innovative motion platform technology
to astronomical heights
to search the skies with unbelievable precision.
Engineers created this,
a lightweight cabin that can be moved anywhere
across the surface of the dish... a real innovation.
It's 10 meters across, looks like a flying saucer,
and it's known as the apple of the eye.
In here, we've got receivers sucking all that data
and sending it back to the control room.
But in order to keep those in exactly the right spot,
we've got two different mechanisms at play.
First, we've got those six towers out there,
which tug this cabin to approximately the right position
using the servo mechanisms
and those six huge steel cables.
Not only does it look like a UFO,
it flies like one, too.
Computers control each cable and position the cabin
as high as 450 feet
and anywhere along a 675-foot trajectory.
And like Cappel's flight simulator,
the cabin pivots by using a motion platform.
For that final bit of precision,
we've got those six hydraulic pistons
controlling this platform,
which allows the position to be corrected
with incredible precision.
Those sensors can be located to within 1 centimeter
in this 500-meter dish.
But this breakthrough engineering
isn't all that makes the FAST telescope
the most sensitive radio telescope on the planet.
Truly precise astronomy
also depends on the location itself.
To avoid any such radio interference,
engineers scope out a quiet,
remote corner of southwest China
in the Guizhou province,
105 miles from its capital, Guiyang.
Fast is situated
in this naturally occurring cast depression,
which are a very common feature of the limestone landscape
down here in Southern China.
It's a long way from nearby towns
which might cause radio interference
which would disturb
the very sensitive astronomical observations.
But even out here,
gathering highly sensitive astronomical observations
would have been impossible
without one major breakthrough from the past.
The FAST telescope in China
is the most sensitive radio telescope on earth.
But building it would have been impossible
without a key innovation from the past.
Astronomer Ryan lynch
is at green bank observatory in West Virginia
exploring how an accidental discovery
revealed a hidden universe.
For most of the history of astronomy,
everything that we learned about the distant cosmos
came from studying optical light,
the kind of the light that we see with our eyes.
But in the 1930s, the dedication of one man changed all of that.
Bell telephone laboratories engineer Karl Jansky
was trying to eliminate static interference
in short-wave radio communications
across the Atlantic.
To trace this interference,
Jansky built a large antenna.
This is an exact replica
of the antenna that Jansky built,
and it is a work of engineering genius.
It's 110 feet wide by 20 feet tall.
Now, it doesn't look anything like TES
of the other telescopes thlittle bit more
like the wing of an old biplane.
But it is an antenna that can detect radio waves from space.
The antenna received radio signals
that were amplified by a radio receiver
and recorded by pen on a moving paper chart.
The antenna was mounted on a platform sitting on tires
that allowed it to rotate,
taking a full 360-degree scan of the sky
once every 20 minutes.
His initial findings revealed a faint
but persistent hiss that would rise and fall
throughout the course of the day.
As he continued to analyze the data
that he collected over many months,
he realized something truly remarkable.
The signal was strongest in the direction
of the center of our galaxy.
Jansky concluded that what he was actually picking up
was radiation from the milky way galaxy itself.
Jansky's extraordinary breakthrough
revealed a new corridor to the cosmos.
Radio telescopes soon yielded groundbreaking discoveries.
And in 1964, astronomers used them
to actually record the faint echoes
emanating from the distant origin of the universe,
the big bang.
Although it would take the work of later astronomers
to really kick-start the field,
Jansky's work offered definitive proof
that radio waves could be detected coming from the cosmos.
His directional movable antenna
and wide-band receiver formed the basis
of all modern radio telescopes.
Jansky, with his plane-wing contraption,
is considered to be one of the fathers
of modern radio astronomy.
Engineers at fast
are taking this revolutionary radio technology even further
and are attempting to detect radio waves
emitted by advanced extraterrestrial life.
But how do you assemble all the signals from space
and transform them into usable data?
Got to take that phenomenal amount of data
and turn it into a picture.
To do this, the team must turn
to a game-changing innovation from the past...
They gave programmers the license to dream big.
...To make the impossible possible.
The FAST telescope in China
is the largest and most powerful
single-dish radio telescope on the planet.
And fast astronomer Peng Bo is at the center of it all.
It was only a dream.
But after 20 years' journey, we made it.
Fast can generate a huge amount of data,
and physicist Andrew Steele
is exploring the groundwork
of this enormous accomplishment.
And this is where the action happens.
This horn is part of a beam receiver.
It slurps up those radio waves
and detects how strong they are.
There's only one of these here now.
But when this thing is finished, there are going to be 19.
That puts it head and shoulders above
any other radio telescope in the world.
But this poses a huge challenge
for the engineers and scientists here at fast.
You've got to take that phenomenal amount of data
and turn it into a picture.
So how do astronomers and engineers
transform radio waves into images?
To pull off the impossible,
the fast team must look to the past.
Science communicator Kate Mulcahy
is investigating an historic silk mill
in northern England
to uncover the unlikely origins of big data processing.
In the 18th century,
garments made from intricately woven fabrics
were the height of fashion all across Europe.
The looms work by interweaving two sets of thread.
The longitudinal threads are called the warp.
And the threads running across are called the weft.
Now, producing such detailed designs was no easy task,
and producers really struggled to meet demands.
To quicken production,
French Weaver Joseph Marie jacquard
invented a machine
that revolutionized the industry.
And this is it.
This is the jacquard loom.
Amazingly, all of these complex mechanisms
are actually governed by a few simple cards.
This is a card cutter.
Skilled workers would use this
to translate complex patterns
into a language that the loom could understand.
The first step would be to copy the pattern
onto squared paper, a bit like this.
Then for every piece of the pattern
that's in a square, a hole would be punched
in a corresponding position on my card.
Each punch card represents only one line of weave,
which is pretty amazing.
The next thing we need to do is to take my card,
put it into the loom,
and that's when the magic really happens.
When the cards enter the head of the machine,
the loom's horizontal rods press into them.
Each rod controls an individual thread.
When there is a hole in the card,
the corresponding thread lifts up.
In this way, the cards dictate the pattern being woven.
One pattern could take thousands of cards.
Brilliantly, if you needed to change or mend your pattern,
you simply need to load more cards.
Whilst a hand-loom operator
could produce around 2 inches of fabric a day,
the amazing jacquard loom could produce 30 times as much.
And it only required one person to operate it.
But just how will this breakthrough innovation
help fast astronomers transform radio waves
into images of the universe?
The FAST telescope is the biggest
and most precise radio telescope on the planet.
At over 1,600 feet in diameter,
the dish can transform faint radio waves
billions of light-years away
into stunning images of the universe.
But to do this,
fast must process an extraordinary amount of data,
which would have been impossible without a breakthrough
in 19th-century textile manufacturing,
the jacquard loom.
One pattern could take thousands of cards.
Brilliantly, if you needed to change or mend your pattern,
you simply need to load more cards.
This punched-card system with holes and no holes
is essentially an early version of binary code.
Jacquard's genius breakthrough
changed data processing forever.
Inspired by this, American inventor Herman Hollerith
developed similar cards for storing information
collected from the 1890 U.S. census.
Holes denoted specific meanings like age, gender,
and marital status
and were read by Hollerith's tabulation machines,
which allowed census data to be collated
10 times faster than previously.
In the 1960s, computer programmers
were using punch cards to create, edit,
and store computer programs.
Incredibly, this is actually a computer program.
It's a series of instructions encoded in holes
telling the computer exactly what to do.
Now, just like the punch cards we looked at earlier,
where each card represented a single line of the pattern,
here, each card represents
one single instruction for the computer.
So a computer program could end up
being made up of thousands of cards.
By the 1980s, punch cards reached their limits,
and programmers began using magnetic disks
that could store more data.
Punch cards were the first big step
towards building a computer that could be programmed
to do just about anything you can imagine.
They gave programmers the license to dream big.
Suddenly, the possibilities were endless,
from connecting the planet
to better understanding the universe.
Through the pioneering work of Joseph jacquard,
binary code,
and the dramatic advances in computer processing,
the fast team can transform faint radio wave signals
into otherworldly images.
Here, this is the supercomputer systems
we are building for fast.
At fast's central control,
astronomers across the world
are using the vast amounts of data
to unlock the mysteries of our universe.
Radio waves travel through space like light
but are invisible to the human eye.
To turn these signals into images,
astronomers use computer software
to label each individual wave with a color code.
The buildup of color forms a recognizable visual pattern.
But to create such radio images,
astronomers must process a lot of data.
Officially completed in September 2016,
fast is now searching the skies further
and deeper than ever before.
Fast is going to revolutionize radio astronomy
and transform the way that we look at the universe.
We just didn't know it was possible
to build a dish this big.
So we didn't know that you could make a machine this accurate
and this powerful.
For astronomer Peng Bo,
it's the culmination of a lifelong dream.
By drawing inspiration
from the great pioneers of the past,
adapting, super-sizing,
and developing innovations of their own,
the designers, engineers, and workers
at the FAST telescope
have succeeded in making the impossible possible.
Fast is going to allow us to scan more of the sky
more quickly than was ever possible before.
It's going to give us fresh insight
into why the universe looks the way it looks
and where it came from.
And even more than that, this huge geodesic bowl
buried deep in the rugged south Chinese countryside
is just an engineering marvel.