Status and perspectives of the CRAFTS extra-galactic HI survey

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is expected to complete its commissioning in 2019. FAST will soon begin the Commensal Radio Astronomy FasT Survey (CRAFTS), a novel and unprecedented commensal drift scan survey of the entire sky visible from FAST. The goal of CRAFTS is to cover more than 20000 deg2 and reach redshift up to about 0.35. We provide empirical measurements of the beam size and sensitivity of FAST across the 1.05 to 1.45 GHz frequency range of the FAST L-band array of 19-beams (FLAN). Using a simulated HI-galaxy catalogue based on the HI Mass Function (HIMF), we estimate the number of galaxies that CRAFTS may detect. At redshifts below 0.35, over 6 × 105 HI galaxies may be detected. Below the redshift of 0.07, the CRAFTS HIMF will be complete above a mass threshold of 109.5M⊙. FAST will be able to investigate the environmental and redshift dependence of the HIMF to an unprecedented depth, shedding light onto the missing baryon and missing satellite problems. © 2019, Science China Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.