Can someone explain the following to a relative layman to the science of radio astronomy?<p>a) How much more can this accomplish in comparison to the well known Arecibo Radio Telescope?<p>b) How is a fixed parabolic dish radio telescope different from a radio telescope array like Karl. G. Jansky Very Large Array? What are the relative pros and cons of one over the other?<p>c) How do you 'steer' the telescope to look at different parts of the sky? I understand the dish is fixed, but the feed horns can be repositioned, but I don't really understand the physics/math behind it, other than the focus is changed.<p>I also assume there may be some massive supercomputers doing the data analysis of the vast amounts of data collected. Any details of the back end computing infrastructure dedicated to this effort?
<i>The "Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope", or FAST, is the size of 30 football fields...</i><p>This thing will look adorable when the Square Kilometre Array comes on line in 2020 and starts pumping many Petabits of data per second.<p><a href="https://www.skatelescope.org/signal-processing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.skatelescope.org/signal-processing/</a><p>Oh look! They're hiring...<p><a href="https://www.skatelescope.org/people-contacts/vacancies/" rel="nofollow">https://www.skatelescope.org/people-contacts/vacancies/</a>