Installation of antenna system a milestone

The main reflector of a 40-meter-aperture radio telescope's antenna system was hoisted on Oct 7 in Shigatse city, Xizang autonomous region, marking a milestone in the construction of the device that will provide stronger support for the country's lunar and deep-space probe missions as well as manned moon landing.

The Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the institutions that developed the telescope, said that the device is part of the fourth phase of the nation's lunar exploration project.

Together with the radio telescope on the Changbai Mountains, Jilin province, which completed the hoisting of its main reflector of the antenna system in August, the Shigatse station, at an elevation of about 4,100 meters, will join China's Very Long Baseline Interferometry network upon its completion.

The VLBI measures the time difference between the arrival of signals at multiple Earth-based antennas, simulating a virtual telescope with a size equal to the maximum separation between the telescopes.

The country's VLBI network currently has observatories in Beijing, Shanghai, Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Kunming in Yunnan province. The inclusion of the two new telescopes is expected to strengthen the network's observation capability.

It will allow simultaneous observation of the moon in two celestial regions, and be able to determine the orbit of deep space probes, said the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.

Construction of the fully movable, high-precision and multipurpose radio telescope in Shigatse, which kicked off last September, is scheduled to be completed at the end of this year, and may be able to realize observations for the VLBI early next year.

The construction of the telescope on the Changbai Mountains is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year, Xinhua News Agency reported. These new big science installations are also expected to facilitate more scientific findings of supermassive black holes and the dynamics of the galaxy.

zhouwenting@chinadaily.com.cn