Adding Assistance to the National Lunar Exploration Project will Enhance China's Radio Astronomy Research Capacity

CCTV news: Today (October 11), the Changbai Mountain 40 meter aperture radio telescope construction project led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Astronomical Observatory was launched in the Changbai Mountain Conservation and Development Zone in Jilin Province. After its completion, the telescope will undertake tasks such as the fourth phase of China's lunar exploration project and the measurement orbit for deep space exploration

CCTV news: Today (October 11), the Changbai Mountain 40 meter aperture radio telescope construction project led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Astronomical Observatory was launched in the Changbai Mountain Conservation and Development Zone in Jilin Province. After its completion, the telescope will undertake tasks such as the fourth phase of China's lunar exploration project and the measurement orbit for deep space exploration.

The completed Changbai Mountain 40 meter aperture radio telescope is a fully real, fully movable, high-precision, and multi-purpose horizon radio telescope. In the future, it is planned to be equipped with 7 bands of high sensitivity cooling receivers to achieve continuous spectrum coverage from 700MHz to 50GHz, as well as simultaneous S/X dual frequency band observation, with the potential to upgrade to 86GHz observation.

In the future, this radio telescope, together with the Xigaze 40 meter aperture radio telescope, the Shanghai 65 meter Tianma telescope, the Shanghai 25 meter Sheshan telescope, the Yunnan Kunming 40 meter telescope, the Urumqi Nanshan 26 meter telescope and the Shanghai VLBI data processing center, which were launched in September this year, will form the "six stations and one center" observation network of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Observatory, In order to effectively improve and enhance the configuration of China's existing very long baseline interferometry network, enhance observation capabilities, and better serve the measurement orbit mission of China's deep space exploration. In addition, the winter air in Changbai Mountain is dry and there are many sunny days, making it particularly suitable for telescope observation in the high-frequency range. The construction of the Changbai Mountain 40 meter caliber radio telescope will enhance China's research capabilities in radio astronomy, and promote more innovative achievements in a series of cutting-edge fields of astronomy, such as supermassive black holes, fast time-varying dense celestial bodies, electromagnetic correspondences of gravitational waves, dynamics of the Milky Way, and high-precision integrated reference frames for heaven and earth.

Shen Zhiqiang, Director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Observatory: It is expected that the construction and performance test of the entire telescope will be completed by the end of 2024. After its completion, it will participate in the follow-up tasks of the national lunar exploration project.

Editor: Liu Shan Responsible Editor: Liu Liang

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