Where is the world's largest single-dish telescope located that is used to study astronomy and the ionosphere?

Answer 1

The Hubble Space Telescope is the most powerful in terms of capability because it doesn't have to see through the atmosphere. The biggest earth-based optical telescopes are on an island in Hawaii and a mountain in South Africa. The largest land-based telescope array is in Puerto Rico and is a radio telescope array

Answer 2

That's hard to say, because there are different types of telescopes that work with different types of radiation, so it is hard to compare one with another.
The most powerful optical telescope to date is the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), which is located on Arizona's Mount Graham. So far, the LBT has achieved an image quality that even surpasses that of the Hubble Space Telescope: when using just one of the two mirrors, it was able to capture images that were 3x sharper than that of Hubble. When both mirrors are used, it is expected that the LBT will be able to capture images that are ten times the sharpness of Hubble.

The most powerful radio telescope to date is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is composed of thousands of small antennas spread across South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. When combined, these antennas create a single giant radio telescope, allowing scientists to map billions of galaxies up to the edge of the observable Universe.

Answer 3

The Hubble Space Telescope is the largest visible-light observatory ever placed into space. Hubble's orbit, some 612 km (380 mi) above Earth's surface, keeps it above almost all of Earth's atmosphere, at a location where its view of the heavens is much clearer than that of ground-based telescopes. The superior view afforded by Hubble's orbit has made the telescope a unique resource for astronomers worldwide and has led to fundamental discoveries about the size and age of the universe, the birth and death of stars, and the development of galaxies.

Answer 4

About half the size of a football field and 21 stories tall, the largest optical telescope ever constructed will use almost 1,000 mirrors to hunt for exoplanets and maybe even unlock the secrets of spacetime.

Comments: I think this answer refers to the "Overwhelmingly Large Telescope".

Obviously, it isn't the largest because it hasn't been built yet.

The largest telescope at present is in the Canary Islands.

For a list of the largest telescopes see Wikipedia: "List of Largest Optical Reflecting Telescopes".

Answer 5

It's hard to answer this because of the way modern telescopes are constructed. In the largest current scopes, multiple mirrors are used; depending on your prejudices, those may or may not "count."

Also, it's possible to combine the light from two or more telescopes considerable distances apart to obtain greater light-gathering capability and a longer baseline for interferometry. I'm going to ignore interferometers except where their components are worthy of consideration in their own right.

The best candidates are:

• Large Binocular Telescope at Mount Graham Observatory, Arizona, US: twin 8.4 m mirrors on a single mount, equivalent to an 11.7 m single mirror.
• Gran Telescopio Canarias, La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain: 10.4 m segmented mirror.
• Very Large Telescope, European Southern Observatory's Paranal facility, Cerro Paranal, Chile: 4 separate 8.2 m telescopes. They can be linked as an interferometer, but each of the individual scopes is tied for largest single-mirror scope with:
• Subaru Telescope, operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan but physically located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, US: 8.2 m, largest single-mirror scope (tie).

The largest optical scopes in actual full operation as of August 2009 (LBT and GTC, though both already in use, are not yet fully functional) are Keck 1 and Keck 2, Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii, US (10 m each; they can also be linked as an interferometer).

The Giant Magellan Scope of Las Campanas Observatory in Chile (currently in planning stages; projected completion date 2018) will have 7 8.4 m mirrors (equivalent to a 21.4 m single mirror).

All optical scopes are dwarfed by the largest radio scopes: China's FAST (Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope), under construction in Guizhou, China and slated for completion in 2013, will have a diameter of ... well, 500 m, and Russia's RATAN-600 near Nizhny Arkhyz, Russia is a set of 895 individual reflectors spread over a 576 m circle.

The largest refracting optical telescope is comparatively puny: the 40" (1.02 m) scope at Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, Wisconsin, US, built in 1897 (not a typo; it's over a hundred years old) is the largest that still exists. A 1.2 m scope was built for the 1900 Exhibition in Paris, France as an exhibition piece, but was not well suited for scientific observation and was scrapped around 1910.probley the biggest telescope is either Soho or Hubble.

Answer 6

The largest individual radio telescope dish is the Aricebo Radio Telescope at Aricebo in Puerto Rico. It is 305 m in diameter.

Most radio telescopes however are made up from arrays of dishes which when used together act as a single detector of large size.

The VLA (very Large Array) consists of 27 separate dishes on 3 Y shaped arms 21 km in length.

This however is dwarfed by the VLBA (very large baseline array) with 10 dishes as far apart as Hawaii and the US virgin Islands a distance 8611 km.

Answer 7

Sorry to sound like a physics teacher but...

When talking about telescopes, you should know that different telescopes observe different wavelengths of "light". So the size of the telescope, depends on what "light" (the more general term is electromagnetic radiation, of which visible light is part of").

So the largest visible light telescopes are listed here:

http://astro.nineplanets.org/bigeyes.html

When describing telescopes as massive, you could mean height, weight or area. The largest telescopes by area will not be a single lensed tube but a collection or array of "radio telescopes" or dishes spread over a large ground area and the images "merged" together.

The largest radio telescope dish (from wikipedia search on "radio telescopes")

"The world's largest filled-aperture telescope (i.e., a full dish) is the Arecibo radio telescope located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, whose 305 m (1,001 ft) dish is fixed in the ground"

The largest radio array, covering the largest area, i believe is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array

An even bigger telescope array is planned for 2012 in Western Australia...then there's the Hubble space telescope in orbit around the Earth.

Answer 8

the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii each have a diameter of 396 inches. Europe's Very Large Telescope is made of 4 telescopes connected together to have the power of a 630 inch telescope.

Answer 9

Galileo was the first to make a powerful telescope. He was able to see the satellites of Jupiter, sun spots and the hills and valleys of the moon.

Answer 10

The Gran Telescopio Canarias, at the Observatorio del Rogue de los Muchachos, on the Canary Islands. It has a 10.4 meter segmented primary mirror.