JAKARTA – China reportedly will launch its first giant space telescope, its existence is considered to be a rival to NASA’s Hubble.
Reporting from Space, Saturday (21/5/2022), the telescope from the Bamboo Curtain country is planned to be launched at the end of 2023.
This telescope, later used to examine distant galaxies, and unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
The telescope itself, will be named The Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST).
It is predicted that its capabilities will exceed the telescope that has been relied on by the world, namely Hubble as NASA’s.
Liu Jifeng, deputy director of China’s National Astronomical Observatory, said the CSST telescope would operate in an orbit like Hubble in space.
The telescope will have a lens with a diameter of 6.6 feet (2 meters). CSST’s field of view is said to be 350 times larger than Hubble’s.
If so, then CSST could observe a much larger expanse of sky at any one time than Hubble and would survey 40 percent of the sky with a 2.5 billion pixel camera.
CSST is said to be carrying out a mission to observe outer space for 10 years.
Its mission is to detect objects such as comets and asteroids, study supermassive black holes, and directly image exoplanets.
In its home country, CSST is known as “Xuntian,” which translates to “survey the sky.”
It will operate in the same orbit as the Tiangong space station, hopefully making it easier for astronauts to carry out maintenance.
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