Sky-high ambition

An astronomer's dream of creating a radio telescope to unlock the secrets of the universe came to fruition just before his death. Li Yingxue reports.

A bold idea came to Nan Rendong's mind in the early 1990s, and it took him more than two decades to fulfill his "unreachable" dream.

The idea was to build a radio telescope measuring 500 meters in diameter, even though the biggest one in China at that time was less than 30 meters across.