Save Save For Later. It took three years to design and two years to build the telescope; it was officially opened on 31 October 1961. Radio Telescope: Definition, Parts & Facts Refracting Telescope: Definition, Parts & Facts Interactions in the Sun-Earth-Moon System Fast facts about Parkes radio telescope. #FACT. These observations led him to the then radical conclusion that the Earth was not the center of the universe, as … Share Share On Facebook. The radio telescope as we know it today took three years to design and two years to build. Radio telescopes create a picture of the sky, not in visible light, but in radio waves. So there we have it, 25 facts about the telescope, from its initial documented appearance to the mind-blowing size of the largest modern telescopes, they really are incredible! Most famously, the Italian Galileo Galilei used a telescope to make observations of the heavens. Actual telescopes came along relatively late in the astronomy craze. Over the last 51 years, the basic structure of the radio telescope has remained unchanged. Huge radio telescope in Puerto Rico to close after damage Scientists around the world had used it to search the skies. It is used for radio astronomy.Stars shine and the light can be seen with an ordinary telescope, but they also give off radio waves. The selection of the Parkes telescope site took several years and had to fulfill key technical requirements, such as a stable geology and low radio-frequency interference. The radio telescope is an equatorially mounted 85 foot Cassegrain design built by Blaw Knox in 1961. NASA subsequently used the same telescope design for the satellite tracking dishes of its Deep Space Network, building radio telescopes in Goldstone, Madrid and Tidbinbilla. A radio telescope is a type of antenna, like a huge satellite television dish. Scientists with radio telescopes receive these radio waves and use computers to learn about the stars. FAST’s collecting area is more than 2.5 times that of the 305-metre (1,000-foot) dish at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. FAST, in full Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, astronomical observatory in the Dawodang depression, Guizhou province, China, that, when it began observations in September 2016, became the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world. The Hubble Space Telescope was named after astronomer Edwin P. Hubble in 1983.