Antarctic Survey Telescope AST3 is the second generation of Antarctic Astronomical Optical equipment including three sets of pupil diameter of 500mm survey telescope with large field of view and three different filters (G、R、I band), which is remote-controlled in an unattended observation mode.

Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics & Technology (NIAOT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is responsible for the development of main body of the telescope installed in Chinese Antarctic Kunlun station (altitude 4100m, atmospheric pressure 0.57atm).

AST3 adopts innovative design of catadioptric optical system with the large field of view (8 square degrees) and 680mm primary mirror. AST3 has not only excellent image quality as classical Schmidt system but also advantages of short-tube, compact structure, eliminating distortion and atmospheric dispersion correction. AST3-2 is the second Antarctic Survey Telescope, which adopted new driving method with high precision and low power consumption and high reliability. AST3-2 has also established fault management system with the ability of early warning and self diagnosis.

On January 2017, the expedition team conducted a careful maintenance of AST3-2. For first time AST3-2 has automatically run for the whole Antarctic winter in an unattended observation mode under the extreme environment of Antarctic.

AST3-2 successfully conducted continuous observation of supernova survey and searching of exoplanets so that a large number of extrasolar planets candidates with high confidence were found. Particularly exciting achievement was to detect "optical counterpart" of gravitational waves coming from the merger of two binary neutron stars by AST3-2 from Aug.18 to 28, 2017.

Success of AST3-2 in unattended observation mode for the whole Antarctic winter shows that it has made some breakthrough in the key technology of optical telescope in extreme environment of Antarctic inland.

The third AST3 (AST3-3) which is still under development can make astronomical survey in near infrared band. So observations of time-domain survey and extrasolar planets searching can be made by taking the advantage of Antarctic inland. And it could help further in breaking bottlenecks of infrared observation of China.

AST3-2 installed in Dome A