The China Manned Space Engineering Office previously stated that my country plans to launch China’s first large-scale space survey telescope next year to carry out wide-area survey observations, which will be carried out in the formation and evolution of cosmic structures, dark matter and dark energy, exoplanets and solar system celestial bodies, etc. Cutting-edge scientific research is expected to yield a number of major innovations.
At present, new progress has been made in the development of the initial sample of the sky survey optical facility, and the telescope is expected to be launched after the completion of the Chinese space station.
As the optical module of the Chinese space station, the Sky Survey Space Telescope will be equipped with an optical system with a diameter of 2 meters and a series of state-of-the-art detectors.
The size of the telescope is equivalent to a bus, standing three stories high and weighing more than ten tons. The space survey telescope is mainly divided into two parts, including the sky survey optical facility and the sky survey platform.
According to China’s manned spaceflight engineering plan,The Sky Survey Space Telescope is expected to be put into scientific operation around 2024. The planned mission life is 10 years, and the life can be continuously extended through maintenance.
According to reports, my country’s Sky Survey Telescope is similar to the Hubble Telescope in the United States, but many performance indicators are higher than the 32-year-old Hubble Telescope. The imaging quality and resolution of the survey telescope are comparable to those of the Hubble, but the field of view of the survey telescope is more than 300 times larger than that of the Hubble, because the performance of the main mirror detector determines the performance of the telescope.
In addition to the main mirror, the survey telescope is also equipped with some back-end modules, including coronagraph, terahertz, multi-channel imager, etc., through the joint work of these modules to achieve scientific goals. The optical facilities of the survey telescope are installed on an optical module platform, and the optical module platform and my country’s space station co-orbit flight.
The sky survey telescope can not only realize wide-area sky surveys, but also perform extremely deep observations for specific targets, and can achieve extremely deep imaging observations of 400 square degrees.
Zhang Wei, a researcher at the Center for Space Application Engineering and Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the performance indicators of the survey telescope are better than those of international advanced telescopes such as the Euclidean telescope and the Hubble telescope.
