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Chinas New Space Station Has a Big Role to Play, Scientifically and Diplomatically.

Chinas New Space Station Has a Big Role to Play, Scientifically and Diplomatically.

Tiangong space station, or "Heavenly Palace", is China's new permanent space station. The country has previously launched two temporary trial space stations, named as Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2. The new lab Wentian is the second of three key modules to Tiangong. The first key module Tianhe - which contains living quarters for crew members - was sent into orbit in April 2021. The other key module, Mengtian science lab, is due to be launched by the end of 2022.

 

China has big ambitions for Tiangong. The station will have its own power, propulsion, life support systems and living quarters. It is also designed to provide refuelling power to China's new space telescope, called Xuntian, which will fly close to the space station next year.

 

 

China is only the third country in history to have put both astronauts into space and to build a space station, after the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the US. China hopes Tiangong will replace the International Space Station (ISS), which is due to be decommissioned in 2031. Chinese astronauts are currently excluded from the ISS because US law bans its space agency, Nasa, from sharing its data with China.

 

China's plans to reach the Moon and Mars

China's ambitions do not end there. A few years from now it wants to take samples from asteroids near the Earth. By 2030, it aims to have put its first astronauts on the Moon, and to have sent probes to collect samples from Mars and Jupiter.

 

 

What are other countries doing?

As China expands its role in space, several other countries are also aiming to get to the Moon.

Nasa plans to return to the Moon with astronauts from the US and other countries from 2025 onwards and has already rolled its new giant SLS rocket at the Kennedy Space Center,

Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, the United Arab Emirates are also working on their own lunar missions.

India has launched its second major Moon mission already and wants to have its own space station by 2030.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency, which is working with Nasa on Moon missions, is also planning a network of lunar satellites to make it easier for astronauts to communicate with Earth.

 

What is China's history in space?

China put its first satellite into orbit in 1970 - as it went through massive disruptions caused by the Cultural Revolution. The only other powers to have gone into space by that stage were the US, the Soviet Union, France and Japan. In the past 10 years, China has launched more than 200 rockets.

 

It has already sent an unmanned mission to the Moon, called Chang'e 5, to collect and return rock samples. It planted a Chinese flag on the lunar surface - which was deliberately bigger than previous US flags.

 

With the launch of Shenzhou 14, China has now put 14 astronauts into space, compared with 340 by the US and more than 130 by the Soviet Union (and now Russia).

 

But there have been setbacks. In 2021, part of a Chinese rocket tumbled out of orbit and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean and two launches failed in 2020.

 

Who is paying for China's space programme?

Chinese state media Xinhua said at least 300,000 people have worked on China's space projects - almost 18 times as many as currently work for Nasa. The Chinese National Space Administration was set up in 2003 with an initial annual budget of two billion yuan ($300m, £240m).

 

However, in 2016 China opened its space industry to private companies, and these are now investing more than 10 billion yuan ($1.5bn, £1.2bn) a year, according to Chinese media.

Why is China going into space?

China is keen to develop its satellite technology, for telecommunications, air traffic management, weather forecasting and navigation and more. But many of its satellites also have military purposes. They can help it spy on rival powers, and guide long-range missiles.

 

Lucinda King, space project manager at Portsmouth University, says China is not just focussing on high-profile space missions: "They are prolific in all aspects of space. They have the political motivation and the resources to fund their planned programmes. China's Moon missions are partly motivated by the opportunities to extract rare earth metals from its surface.

 

However, Prof Sa'id Mosteshar, director of the London Institute of Space Policy and Law at the University of London, says it probably would not pay for China to send repeated mining missions to the Moon. Instead, he says China's space programme is driven more by a desire to impress the rest of the world. "It's a projection of power and a demonstration of technological advancement."

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Source: BBC

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

China Tianyan, begins search for extrate...

China Tianyan, begins search for extraterrestrial civilizations

The 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), known as the "China Tianyan", has officially begun the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, looking for signals from intelligent life deep in the universe, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said today.

 

 

The search for and monitoring of radio pulsars is a core scientific objective of FAST. And the search for extraterrestrial civilizations is one of the scientific goals of the FAST telescope. In September 2018, researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of California, Berkeley, and Beijing Normal University conducted installation tests on the high-resolution extraterrestrial civilization search backend at the FAST site.

 
 
 

In July 2019, the researchers again analyzed and processed the obtained drift scan data to achieve a frequency resolution of 4 Hz and successfully removed most of the RF interference to screen out multiple sets of narrowband candidate signals.

 

 

On April 14, the FAST Scientific Research and Data Processing Center, which will be built in Gui'an New District, has been approved by the National Development and Reform Commission for the feasibility study of the project. The FAST Scientific Research and Data Processing Center project has a total investment of about 170 million yuan and a construction area of 28,000 square meters, including a scientific research center and data processing center. After the completion of the project, "China Tianyan" will finalize the three complete scientific research frameworks of observation, research, and data, providing the conditions for the storage and calculation of the huge amount of data generated by the long-term operation.

 

 

"China Tianyan" was conceived by the Chinese astronomer Nan Rendong in 1994 and took 22 years to build and opened on September 25, 2016. It is a radio telescope led by the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with independent intellectual property rights in China, the world's largest single-caliber, most sensitive radio telescope. Its integrated energy is ten times that of the famous radio telescope Arecibo.Tianyan literally means Eye of the Sky. It is a radio telescope located in the Dawodang depression, a natural basin in Pingtang County, Guizhou.This project is a major national science and technology infrastructure consisting of several parts, such as an active reflector system, a feed support system, a measurement and control system, a receiver and a terminal, and an observation base.

 

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Source: CNTechPost

Tianwen-1 launches for Mars.

Tianwen-1 launches for Mars.

China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission launched successfully Thursday, initiating a phase of deep space and interplanetary exploration. A Long March 5 rocket launched the Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 12:41 a.m. Eastern. Successful Trans-Mars injection was confirmed around 40 minutes later by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

The flight path took the Long March 5 over the Philippines and close to the capital Manila. Spent stages were planned to drop into the surrounding seas. China’s Yuanwang-class tracking ships assisted launch operations, along with support from the European Space Agency’s ESTRACK facilities. First acquisition of the spacecraft as it separated from its Long March 5 launcher was expected to be made by the 15-meter antenna in Kourou, French Guiana. The roughly five metric ton wet mass spacecraft is now on a seven-month journey to the Red Planet. 

 

 

“The Tianwen-1 mission is a major landmark project in the process of building China’s aerospace power , and a milestone project for China’s aerospace to go further and deeper into space,” mission deputy commander Wu Yansheng said in a CASC statement.

Tianwen-1 is due to arrive at Mars in February 2021, entering a highly elliptical orbit. The spacecraft will then move to a near-polar orbit with a periapsis of 265 kilometers for 2-3 months before the rover landing attempt. The orbiter and rover together carry 13 science payloads for a range of detections of the Martian atmosphere, magnetosphere, surface, subsurface and climate.Tianwen-1 is China’s first independent interplanetary mission. Missions to near-Earth objects, a Mars sample return, possible Voyager-like probes and a Jupiter system orbiter are planned for the decade ahead. 

 

 

Delayed landing attempt

The delay will allow the orbiter to survey the candidate landing sites with its cameras and provide the lander with the data required to make its landing attempt. China has selected a portion of Utopia Planitia, south of Viking 2, as the landing area for the 240-kilogram rover. The selection was made based on science goals and engineering constraints, which include low elevation to provide more atmosphere and time to slow the lander’s descent as well as the solar power needs of the rover. The landing ellipsis will be 100 by 20 kilometres.

The early part of the lander’s entry and descent will be aided by aeroshell and parachute know-how from the Shenzhou human spaceflight missions. A blunt-body aeroshell will help slow the speed of the entry vehicle from around 4.8 kilometers per second to 460 meters per second over the course of 290 seconds. A disk-band-gap supersonic parachute will then further slow the craft to a speed of 95 meters per second over the next minute and a half. Retropropulsion systems from China’s lunar landers will then do the rest of the work. Technologies proven on the Chang’e-3 and -4 missions China sent to the moon in 2013 and 2019, respectively, will provide altimetry and hazard avoidance.

 

 

Tianwen-1 Science goals

The orbiter carries seven science payloads including medium- and high-resolution cameras, the latter comparable to HiRise on NASA’s 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. It also carries a magnetometer, a sounding radar and instruments for atmospheric and ionosphere detections. The orbiter, which will also perform a relay function, is designed to operate for one Mars year, or 687 Earth days.

The rover, designed to last 90 Mars days, carries six instruments, including a laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy experiment similar to that carried by NASA’s Curiosity rover for detecting surface elements, minerals and rock types. As well as topography and multispectral imagers, the vehicle has payloads related to climate and magnetic field detections. The rover also carries a ground-penetrating radar. Elena Pettinelli of Roma Tre University, Italy, who was involved in the ground-penetrating radar experiments on the Chang’e-3 and -4 rovers, says the instruments on orbiter and rover could potentially provide a lot of new information.

 

 

Into deep space

Tianwen-1 is designated as the first in a new series of interplanetary and deep space exploration. The missions build upon on China’s Chang’e lunar exploration exploits and plans. Next is the tentatively named ZhengHe mission, which aims to collect samples from near-Earth asteroid 2016HO3/469219 Kamo’oalewa and return these to Earth before heading to main belt comet 133P/Elst-Pizarro. The mission profile requires launch to take place in 2022.

A mission featuring two “Interstellar Heliosphere Probes” is also being pushed. Two launches would use a Jupiter assist to follow up on the discoveries of the Voyagers. In addition, concepts for missions to Jupiter are being studied for launch in 2030, which could complement the studies of the Jovian system by NASA’s Europa Clipper and ESA’s JUICE missions.

 

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Source: By Andrew Jones for Sapce News

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