The 973 Program on Research of the Key Technologies for 110-m Aperture Fully Steerable Radio Telescope (hereinafter referred to as QTT-973 program) was held in Cheng Du between 25-26 January, 2018. More than 100 participants were present at the meeting including the program experts, leaders from Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region, project backbones as well as colleagues from the same field.

The central theme of the meeting was on the key technologies and science goals of the 110-m aperture fully steerable radio telescope. Wang Na, chief scientist of the QTT-973 program, gave a welcome speech at the meeting, and presented a progress report on the program and thus far the significant research results, and each of the project backbones presented the research progress and outcomes. In the past year, steady progress was seen in the four key research sub-programs that have led to in-depth enhancement on several research areas such as the frontier science pre-research, antenna theory design, main reflector control system, receiver system design, software system of strategy astronomical observation. In the search of related science topics, the QTT-973 program team has also explored on areas related to the gravitational wave detection and high precision wireless measurement of QTT, executed the research on planetary microwave ranging and carried out candidate selection for the supermassive black holes from gravitational wave source, perfected the autonomous high precision ephemeris and applied it to improve the ephemerides noises from timing of high precision pulsars, and examined the basic scheme for constructing a high accuracy space-time frame based on pulsar timing. To deal with the simplicity of the phase error distribution obtained by the rapid measuring techniques based on traditional phase retrieval algorithm, a new method using the flexibility of the active reflector surface is proposed creatively to reconstruct the phase distribution of the antenna aperture surface, which improves the rapid measuring accuracy effectively.

The leaders and experts, who attended the meeting, fully affirmed and highly appreciated the results of the current research and achievements of QTT-973 program. They thought that the program was useful in preparing the theoretical and technological foundation for the actual engineering construction and that it made clearer on the necessity and irreplaceability of program construction. In addition, they expressed desire for the QTT-973 program team to continue enhancing the pre-research of science goals and strive to gain breakthrough on the key technologies for building the 110-m aperture fully steerable radio telescope with superior performance.

The meeting was held for the purpose of laying a good foundation for smoothing the works in later stages of the QTT-973 program, and for preparing the project implementation and construction.