China’s advances in space exploration are outpacing those of the United States, attracting European and Asian partners.
A satellite jointly developed by France and China has been launched to search for the most powerful explosions in space, a striking example of cooperation between Western countries and Asian powers.
The 930-kilogram satellite, carrying four instruments – two made in France and two made in China – was launched on Saturday aboard China’s Long March 2C rocket from a base in Xichang, southwest China’s Sichuan province, at around 3pm (7am GMT), state television (CCTV) reported.
The Space Variable Object Monitor (SVOM), developed by engineers from both countries, will hunt for gamma ray bursts, light that has traveled billions of light years to reach Earth.
Gamma-ray bursts typically occur after the explosion of a massive star – more than 20 times the mass of the Sun – or the nuclear fusion of a compact star.
The extremely bright cosmic beam could release a burst of energy worth more than a billion suns.
“The light from these objects takes a long time to reach us, so observing them is like looking back in time,” astrophysicist Ole Gottlieb of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York told AFP.
“SVOM is [gamma-ray bursts, GRBs]This includes detecting the most distant GRBs in the Universe, which represent the earliest GRBs,” Gottlieb added.
The most distant burst seen so far occurred just 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still in its infancy.
The satellites orbit 625 km (388 miles) above Earth and transmit data to the observatory. If a burst is detected, SVOM sends an alert to a team working around the clock.
Analysts say analyzing the data could help to better understand the composition of the universe and the dynamics of gas clouds and other galaxies.
But the biggest challenge is that gamma-ray bursts are so brief that scientists have to race against the clock to gather information.
The project was born out of a partnership between the French and Chinese space agencies, as well as other science and technology groups from both countries.
This level of space cooperation between Western countries and China is also fairly rare, especially since the United States banned all cooperation between the U.S. space agency NASA and Beijing in 2011.
“US concerns about technology transfer have led allies to refrain from cooperating much with China, but cooperation does occur from time to time,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told AFP.
So while SVOM is “by no means unique,” it remains “important” in terms of space cooperation between China and the West, McDowell added.
China’s advances in space and lunar exploration are rapidly outpacing those of the United States, and as a result, it is attracting partners from European and Asian countries.
China’s lunar probe Chang’e-6 delivered cargo to the far side of the moon this month, provided by the European Space Agency and research institutes in Pakistan, France and Italy.
China is working with countries including Brazil, Egypt and Thailand to develop and launch satellites.
