The FAST telescope in Guizhou, China. Photo: Google Earth In the hills of China’s Guizhou province, a natural rock bowl cradles the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope. This instrument, called FAST – the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope – is, as its name suggests, 500 meters, or about 1,640 feet, across, a size that helps scientists detect more distant and fainter objects. And in late March, FAST began accepting scientific proposals from international astronomers for the first time. The timing couldn’t have been better. In August 2020, a support cable on the next-largest telescope of this sort – part of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the only telescope of its class in the United States – snapped. Another cable followed a few months later. Then, in December, with a puff of dust, the massive instrument platform that once hung above the telescope crashed down, destroying the 305-meter dish.