Flagship Chinese space telescope to orbit with space station

China is currently developing a large-scale space-survey telescope that is expected to bring pioneering scientific results after it is placed in orbit alongside the country’s space station, a spokesperson of the China Manned Space Agency said Friday.

Lin Xiqiang, also deputy director of the agency, said at a press conference that the Chinese Survey Space Telescope, also known as the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST) and Xuntian Space Telescope, is expected to make breakthroughs in cosmology, dark matter and dark energy, galaxies and active galactic nuclei, Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, star formation and evolution, and exoplanets.

Lin said the high-resolution telescope will take deep-field survey observations with an area of 17,500 square degrees, as well as fine observations of different types of celestial bodies.

He said that the telescope, an important part of the China Space Station, can obtain high-definition panoramic views of the universe. It has roughly the same spatial resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope, but its field of view is more than 300 times larger than the Hubble’s.

The telescope will stay in the same orbit as the space station for long-term independent flight and observations, and will dock with the space station temporally for supply, maintenance and upgrading, Lin added.