Science: The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) based in China is designed to peer deeper into space and measure more spectral emissions than the project that inspires it, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

Engineers this month are installing LAMOST's eyes and optic nerves: 1-meterwide hexagonal sections of its two mirrors and the 4000 optical fibers on its focal surface that will feed starlight into a battalion of spectrographs. Viewing conditions at Xinglong, in China's industrialized north, are not ideal: Independent experts say that siting the scope in western China would have been better. Every week, dust and sand blown in from the Gobi Desert have to be brushed off the correcting mirror. On the bright side, Xinglong, in the foothills of the Yanshan Mountains, gets an average of 270 clear nights of viewing each year. The whole system--which has cost $40 million so far to build--should be in place by fall, when final testing will begin, says LAMOST's chief engineer, Cui Xiangqun, director of Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology. Data collection should begin in earnest next year.