China's Space Program News Thread

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A space lab will be launched in two years ahead of a key fueling experiment vital for the building of a space station, a leading official with the manned space program said.

Shortly after the lab goes into orbit, a freighter will be launched. Tests and research on the freighter technology have produced encouraging results, said Zhou Jianping, chief designer of the manned space program and a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

The space lab, Tiangong-2, will be built using backup craft for the Tiangong-1 space module.

Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011. Tiangong-2 will have a number of upgrades and modifications, the most important being its ability to refuel from the freighter, he said. China will work to build a space station after the Tiangong-2 space lab completes its mission, Zhou added.

"It's like air-to-air refueling, but the technology used in weightless space poses new challenges," he said. The space lab will also conduct experiments, he said, without elaborating.

The Shenzhou X spacecraft, carrying three astronauts, will be launched in June and dock with the Tiangong-1 module, he said. Docking was successfully carried out by the unmanned Shenzhou VIII in 2011 and by the manned Shenzhou IX in 2012.

"After that, there will be no more manned dockings for the Tiangong-1, but it will continue to orbit Earth," he said. "It is likely that the two Tiangong vehicles will be in orbit at the same time," he said.

Experiments were conducted last year to see if two men can survive in an enclosed space, where oxygen, water and food are partly recycled, said Ye Peijian, a lunar exploration specialist and a national political adviser.

 

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China looks to increase its global market share in commercial space launch to 15 percent by 2020 from three percent at present, a top rocket expert said Saturday.

China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology will explore new business models of the in-orbit delivery and space-and-ground integration, the academy's deputy head Liang Xiaohong said at an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

The academy is working to establish strategic alliances with other major launch service providers in the world, and set up strategic cooperation relations with major satellite manufacturers, he said.

The academy is also striving to set up a management system in line with the market and international standard, he added.

The cost-efficient advantage of Chinese rockets is not as prominent as before due to the rising of Japanese and Indian aerospace industry and private aerospace enterprises from the United States and Europe, he said.

The academy will adopt a globalization strategy and carry out world-class researches on advanced space technologies and engineering to better tap the international market, he said.

China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology is the premier space launch vehicle manufacturer in China and one of the major launch service providers in the world.

 

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With images of fireballs slashing through the skies over Russia still fresh in people's minds, China's top asteroid scientist called for greater research into the dangers asteroids pose.

Major space powers have become more aware in recent years of the threat posed by objects hurtling toward Earth, but more needs to be done, said Zhao Haibin, an asteroid researcher at Purple Mountain Observatory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

On Feb 15, a rock 17 meters in diameter smashed into a frozen lake on the outskirts of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in the Urals. Its shockwaves injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes.

The energy unleashed was around 30 times that of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, according to NASA estimates. The next day a 130,000-metric-ton asteroid, with a diameter of 40 to 50 meters, passed closer to Earth than many communication and weather satellites.

Earlier last week, an asteroid slammed into Cuba, but did not cause any casualties or damage to property.Russia is considering establishing a body to monitor asteroids. A meteor shower rained on Jilin province in 1976, the only recorded instance of space rocks hitting the country.

But the actual number of meteor hits would be much higher, Zhao said. There is ample evidence of meteor hits over the centuries across China. But there is another reason asteroids are a hot topic. As the planet's resources become increasingly scarce, countries and organizations are looking to asteroids for mineral supplies.

Chinese scientists first turned their attention to asteroids in 1949 and were world leaders at the time. But "observing near-Earth objects is not a major priority now, so the input is relatively small", Zhao said.

China's lunar probe Chang'e-2 flew 10 million km and conducted the country's first exploration of the near-Earth asteroid Toutatis on Dec 13, making China the fourth country to explore asteroids in space.

But such missions cannot be carried out regularly since there is no national plan and close-up explorations are costly, he said. So current research on asteroids in China relies mostly on ground-based observation, which costs less and allows scientists to study a large number of asteroid samples, he said.

More than 400 observation stations across the globe are doing research and contributing to asteroid research goals set by NASA.

NASA set a 10-year goal in 1998 to identify and catalogue the orbital characteristics of 90 percent of near-Earth objects larger than 1 km. It set another 20-year goal in 2005 to detect 90 percent of near-Earth objects with a size greater than 140 meters in diameter starting in 2008. The data from the research were shared internationally.

China's few asteroid researchers are contributing to the efforts. A Schmidt telescope with a 1-meter aperture was put into use in 2006 at Purple Mountain Observatory, which has found more than 1,200 asteroids so far.

Zhao is preparing for a project that aims to use an optical telescope and observe the rotation periods of several thousands asteroids within a few years, which he hoped would be useful for possible future close-up asteroid exploration missions.

"Knowledge gained from ground observation will be important information for deep-space exploration projects, because it could be very dangerous for explorers to get close to asteroids if the designers lack knowledge about things such as how an asteroid circles in an orbit and how it rotates," he said.

But if China needs to learn more about asteroids, the country's "not-so-advanced" ground observation capability will need to be improved, he said. The observatory's Near-Earth Objects Survey Telescope is the largest of its kind in China and the most advanced in Asia, but it is only a small to medium telescope globally, he said.

Relatively large Schmidt telescopes, those having a 1-meter aperture or larger, have been in use since the 1940s. Between 1945 and 1980, eight telescopes of this kind were built worldwide. The Karl Schwarzschild Observatory in Germany has a 2-meter Schmidt telescope, the world's largest.

 

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An experimental spacecraft will be launched before 2015 to conduct crucial re-entry tests on the capsule to be used in the Chang'e-5 lunar-sample mission, a leading space program official said.

Chang'e-5 is expected to be China's first lunar explorer to return to Earth. The mission will be carried out before 2020.

The experimental spacecraft will consist of the Chang'e-2 lunar orbiter base structure as well as the return capsule that will be used by the Chang'e-5, said Hu Hao, chief designer of the lunar exploration program's third phase and a deputy to the National People's Congress.

"Scientists believe we need to launch the spacecraft to prove that our current technical plan can actually bring Chang'e-5 home safely," Hu told China Daily on the sidelines of the NPC annual session.

He explained that when the Chang'e-5 returns to Earth with samples of lunar soil, the capsule will be hurtling through Earth's atmosphere at, or close to, speeds of 11.2 km per second.

"The re-entry speed means the return capsule could overheat or prove difficult to track and control," he said. None of China's spacecraft have ever re-entered the atmosphere so fast and no simulation test can recreate the challenge, he said.

"The Chang'e-5 mission will enter the prototype phase this year," he said. The mission involves a "relay" approach that requires precision rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit.

After launch, the Chang'e-5 will head straight for lunar orbit. Two modules will separate and land on the moon, with one collecting soil samples.

The samples will be placed in the ascending module that will blast off from the lunar surface and dock with the orbiting module. The sample will then be transferred from this module to one that will be used for re-entry.

Yan Jun, head of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and chief scientist of the lunar exploration program, said some of the soil will be scooped up from the surface, but some will be taken from a depth of 2 meters.

The three-step lunar exploration program features "circle, land and return"...

 

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The Operations of China’s First Lunar Rover:

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A ground system aimed at enhancing the navigation precision of China's homegrown BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) was approved in central China's Hubei Province on Friday.

The BeiDou Ground Base Enhancement System (BGBES), a network consisting of 30 ground base stations, an operating system and a precision positioning system, was approved by the evaluation committee led by Sun Jiadong, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and chief designer of the BDS.

The system is expected to help improve the BDS' positioning precision to 2 centimeters horizontally and 5 centimeters vertically via tri-band real-time precision positioning technology, and to 1.5 meters with the single-frequency differential navigation technology.

The former technology, which is much more precise, will be used in special industries like mapping, land resources, urban construction, planning and water conservation, as well as national construction projects. The latter will be put into public use, including vehicle positioning services, said Shi Chuang, director of the global navigation satellite system research center of Wuhan University.

Planned by the central government, the BGBES was built by the center and the Hubei Provincial Surveying and Mapping Bureau as a national pilot project.

The system, which now covers all of Hubei Province on a trial basis, will be further established across China to better meet the needs of BDS users, said Shi.

Liu Jingnan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and professor with Wuhan University, said the BGBES has helped improve positioning precision, sensitivity and positioning speed to a great extent, enabling the BDS to compete with the U.S.-developed Global Positioning System (GPS).

Liu said he believes the BGBES project had reached, and in some parts exceeded, international standards. "The BDS has entered a new era of high precision," he said...

 

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Some info about china ABM system construction from a R&D doc...

- first image shows the surveillance region of 2 missile warning sats (SJ-11 series..) We can see that Asia, Africa and Europe are being monitored and the 2 surveillance zones overlap around India...

- second image shows the location of three radar bases and their respective detection zone: there are a long-range surveillance and ballistic missile defense radar, a mid-course radar and the interceptor fire control radar. I wonder what represent the two white lines. we see that India is almost entirely under the surveillance zone of the first radar.

- last image shows the 2 sats FOV

the following images show the functioning of the 3 radars and a simulation of an interception

I think the interceptor would be HQ-19(??) and one can infer that the fire control radar and the HQ-19 interceptor are located near Beijing. it is clear that India is targeted by this system.

Thanks to [email protected]/forum/index

 

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China will launch the first satellite for its high-resolution system for Earth observation in April, a government agency revealed Thursday.

Examinations of the satellite and its carrier rocket, the Long March 2D, have been completed and the satellite is now in the launch stage, according to the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SATIND).

China plans to launch five to six satellites before the end of 2015 in order to build a spatial, temporal and spectral high-resolution observation system.

The system will mainly provide services for the Ministry of Land and Resources, Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Environmental Protection, and is expected to help reduce disasters, protect resources,the environment and national security, as well as support geographic and oceanic surveys and urban transportation management, the SATIND said.

It will also enhance China's ability to obtain high-resolution observation data and accelerate its development of satellite application technologies, the SATIND said.

 

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That allows you to land aircraft in dense fog.

 

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China Brazil Earth Resource Satellite CBERS-3 satellite launch scheduled in June, 2013 will likely be postponed again after DC / DC converters manufactured by the American company MDI (American Modular Devices Incorporated) again failed with very bad results. New CBERS3 launch date could be delayed almost two years because that's the time needed to rearrange and test the satellite electrical system to operate with a new Brazilian made DC / DC converters.

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