Sheshan radio telescope helps guide lunar mission
Print Edition
The 65-meter radio telescope named Tianma at Sheshan Hill in Songjiaing District was involved for the first time in China’s lunar exploration program and helped guide the soft landing of the Chang’e-3 lunar probe on the moon on December 14.
“The Tianma telescope is used to provide orbital measurement for the probe,” said Wang Xiankun, office manager of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.
At 1:30am on December 2, the Chang’e-3 lunar probe was launched from the Xichang Satellite Center and at 11:06am Tianma captured the first X-band signal from the spacecraft, as shown on the screen in the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Center Hall at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory.
More than 50 staff members from the observatory were on duty for the Chang’e-3 mission.
It is the second phase of China’s lunar exploration program and comprises a lander and a rover, China’s first, named Yutu or Jade Rabbit. The goal of Chang’e-3 is to explore the surface of the moon.
On December 14, the Chang’e-3 probe successfully landed on the moon, the first of China’s spacecraft that had ever performed a soft landing on the moon.
The 380,000-kilometer journey to the moon was guided by the VLBI subsystem formed with six radio telescopes, including Tianma, the largest, and five others located in Beijing’s Miyun, Kunming in Yunnan Province and Urumchi in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The telescope played a significant role during the orbiting and landing of Chang’e-3 and performed precision measurements of the distance between the lander and the rover after the two separated.
Tianma, built in October 2012, is an 8-band receiver and can observe celestial objects at a distance of 10 billion light years. It is ranked No. 1 in Asia and No. 4 in the world in terms of its overall performance.
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