New Chinese space missions to monitor colliding black holes, solar explosions | Science

China's ambitious human space missions hit the headlines, but its nascent space science program is slowly gaining momentum. The Academy of Sciences of China (ACS) confirmed last week the launch of four new scientific satellites from 2020. Four successful missions, including one devoted to X-ray astronomy and another demonstrating the Quantum entanglement above a record 1,200 kilometers, these "phase 2" projects will examine areas such as solar physics and the search for electromagnetic signals badociated with gravitational waves.

Given that China's space science program started about 10 years ago, but there is still not a lot of missions given that it's a big country with great scientific community, "says Xin Wu, a physicist born in China at the University of Geneva in Switzerland who collaborates on Chinese astrophysical missions. "There is an accumulated demand" among Chinese space scientists, he says.

CAS broke with tradition for one of these new missions, the GECAM (Counter-Sky Monitor). He accelerated the selection and development to take advantage of a new scientific opportunity, as Xiong Shaolin, astrophysicist at the CAS High Energy Physics Institute in Beijing, and his colleagues identified a month after the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory has announced its history. detection of gravitational waves in February 2016. They proposed to put two satellites in orbit on opposite sides of the Earth that together could observe the entire sky for gamma rays emanating from events that generate gravitational waves. Funding for the technical studies arrived a few months later, and the mission jumped to the front of the launch queue, with a date of 2020. "When you have that kind of opportunity you can not not manage it as a normal mission, with selection Xiong says:

Up to now, gamma rays and other electromagnetic signals have been detected only from a source. gravitational waves, a fusion of neutron stars, but they provided a wealth of detail on the enigmatic event.The astrophysicists still argue whether the mergers of black holes, the other confirmed source of 39; Gravitational waves, also produce electromagnetic emissions.The GECAM team is betting what they do – and this can be learned from the signals. "I think we will probably find something," says Xiong.

The observations of GECAM comp will drop those from another Phase 2 mission, Einstein Probe (EP), which will examine the skies for low-energy X-rays badociated with violent phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts and black-hole collisions. The combination of GECAM, EP and gravitational wave observations "will allow us to better understand the astrophysics of gamma rays," says Ik Siong Heng, astrophysicist at the University from Glasgow to the United Kingdom.

: Solar Physics Only the United States produces more papers on the ground than China. "But the [China’s] documents used data from missions developed by Japan and the United States and elsewhere," says Gan Weiqun, a solar physicist at the CAS Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing. He says that China's solar scientists have been pushing for their own mission for 40 years; they finally got the nod of the Advanced Solar Observatory based on Space (ASO-S). "It's very important for us to make original contributions in terms of hardware and data," says Gan. He explains that ASO-S will be the first space observatory to monitor the sun's magnetic field while monitoring solar flares and titanic explosions known as coronal mbad ejections. Simultaneous observations could give clues as to how these eruptions are triggered.

The last mission included in the Phase 2 list was identified as a priority years ago. The Solar Energy Ionospheric Probe Explorer (SMILE), a joint mission of CAS and the European Space Agency, will be the first to develop a new imaging technique for the Earth's magnetosphere. . Previous satellites made punctual measurements when they pbaded through the magnetosphere. But scientists have recently learned that collisions between solar wind particles and parasitic particles in the Earth's atmosphere produce low-energy X-rays that illuminate the magnetosphere. Looking at these X-rays, SMILE will capture its dynamic behavior.

The announcement last week augurs well for China's space science program beyond the next four missions. The Phase 2 budget of 4 billion yuan ($ 605 million) includes support for the development of future missions, in particular the X-ray Timing and Polarimetry mission, an ambitious international project led by Chinese scientists to study black holes, neutron stars and magnetars. 19659005] China's planetary exploration programs and astronauts will continue to make history; later this year or early the next day, for example, he plans to land the first probe on the other side of the moon. But the future of his efforts in the field of space science also seems badured.