The FAST Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot survey: I. Project design and pulsar discoveries

Understand

Discovery of pulsars is one of the main goals for large radio telescopes.

• The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), that incorporates an L-band 19-beam receiver with a system temperature of about 20~K, is the most sensitive radio telescope utilized for discovering pulsars.
• We designed the {\it snapshot} observation mode for a FAST key science project, the Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey, in which every four nearby pointings can observe {\it a cover} of a sky patch of 0.1575 square degrees through beam-switching of the L-band 19-beam receiver.
• The integration time for each pointing is 300 seconds so that the GPPS observations for a cover can be made in 21 minutes.