Simulation of FAST EM performance for both the axial and lateral feed defocusing

Abstract

Five-hundred-meter Aperture radio Spherical Telescope (FAST) is the world's largest single dish radio telescope, which is located in Guizhou Province, in southwest China. The FAST feed cabin is supported and positioned by six steel cables. The deviation of the feed position and orientation would lead to loss in the telescope efficiency. In this paper, a series of electromagnetic (EM) simulations of the FAST facility with varying feed positions and orientation offsets was performed. The maximum gain of FAST is about 82.3 dBi and the sibelobe is -32 dB with respect to the main beam at 3 GHz. The simulation results have demonstrated that the telescope efficiency loss is more sensitive to the lateral feed deviation compared with the axial deviation. The telescope efficiency would decrease by 8.2% due to the FAST feed position deviation of 10 mm rms when the observing frequency is 3 GHz. The FAST feed deviation basically has no effect on the sidelobes and cross polarization characteristic according to the simulations.