本文节选自外刊《自然》(Nature / News / Article / 18 February 2022)Asteroids, Hubble rival and Moon base: China sets out space agenda——小行星、哈勃望远镜的竞争对手和月球基地:中国制定了太空议程。
文章下半部分节选内容如下:
Asteroids, Hubble rival and Moon base: China sets out space agenda
小行星、哈勃望远镜的竞争对手和月球基地:中国制定了太空议程
Mars and beyond
火星和更远的地方
China made its first leap into interplanetary space with the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which dropped a lander containing the Zhurong rover on Mars in May.
According to the white paper, China will complete research for sending a craft to Mars to sample rocks and return them to Earth.
根据白皮书,中国将完成向火星发送航天器以采集岩石样本并将其返回地球的研究。
This mission could launch in 2028. (NASA’s Perseverance rover collected the first Mars rocks in 2021. The agency hopes to bring them back to Earth as part of a joint mission with the European Space Agency (ESA), launching in 2026.)
The white paper also lays out China’s plans to eventually probe further into the solar system. The next five years will see the completion of key research for a mission to explore Jupiter and its ocean-filled moon system.
Press reports suggest that this mission could launch as early as 2029 — meaning that it would join ESA’s JUICE and NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to fly in 2023 and 2024.
“Deep space is certainly another area China sees there are a lot of opportunities for scientific breakthroughs,” says Zhang.
“深空无疑是中国认为有很多科学突破机会的另一个领域,”张说。
The country has also set its sights on exploring the boundary of the Solar System.
该国还着眼于 探索 太阳系的边界。
China’s funding agencies have yet to confirm this, or the Jupiter mission, but “a mention in the plan is certainly helpful”, says Zhan Hu, an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.
China also plans to launch a space telescope called Xuntian, whose name means ‘survey the heavens’.
中国还计划发射一个名为“巡天”的太空望远镜,其名字的意思是“巡天”。
This will image in the same wavelengths — ultraviolet, visible and infrared — as those used by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
这将在与美国宇航局哈勃太空望远镜相同的波长下成像——紫外线、可见光和红外线。
Slightly smaller than Hubble, Xuntian will not quite match its predecessor’s resolution; but, at any one time, Xuntian will capture a patch of sky 300 times larger.
China wants to further develop plans to launch a space-based gravitational-wave detector, called Taiji, in the early 2030s.
中国希望进一步发展计划,在21世纪30年代初发射一个名为“太极”的天基引力波探测器。
If launched then, it would be the first of its kind. Such a mission would observe lower-frequency waves than those seen by ground-based detectors such as Advanced LIGO, allowing it to detect higher-mass black holes, including those in the early Universe.
But the experiment would be complex: spotting ripples in space-time will mean detecting shifts of just a few trillionths of a metre in the distances between three spacecraft, positioned 3 million kilometres apart from each other in the shape of a triangle.
An initial pilot satellite, called Taiji-1, completed its mission successfully in 2019, and researchers now hope to fly a two-satellite mission in 2024–25 to test the necessary precision technologies.
This will “remove all the technical obstacles” for the ultimate Taiji mission, says Yue-Liang Wu, a physicist at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
中国科学院大学物理学家吴岳良说,这将“为最终任务扫除所有技术障碍”。
ESA has long planned its own gravitational-wave observatory, LISA, and has already flown a successful pathfinder.
欧空局早就计划建立自己的天基引力波探测器LISA,并且已经成功发射了探路者号引力波试验探测器。
But LISA is not scheduled to launch until 2037.
但是LISA计划在2037年前发射。
Together, the two networks could be used to measure the Hubble constant, which describes the expansion of the Universe, with much greater accuracy than ground-based detectors can, say researchers behind the mission.