How Nasa’s James Webb and China’s Xuntian space telescopes could cooperate in future

The images from the James Webb telescope have captivated people around the world and energised the scientific community
Meanwhile, China’s space programme is making rapid progress, and its Xuntian telescope, with its massive field of vision, could find synergies with the US facility, and so help foster broader mutual understanding

Quentin Parker

Published: 9:15am, 27 Jul 2022

Why you can trust SCMP

Recently, the wonderful images from the James Webb Space Telescope have rightly been grabbing global headlines and accolades as the astonishing details of the near-infrared universe have been brought into sharp focus and to a greater depth than ever before.

Untold discoveries and wonders await. Teams of scientists are working to bring the first scientific publications to the world, including in my research field of planetary nebulae where a “whole community” publication with a large number of authors, including myself, is under way using one of the first science-grade “global community” images released of Planetary Nebulae NGC3132, commonly known as the Southern Ring Nebula.

I can’t quite believe this US$10 billion facility – named controversially after a Nasa administrator – is now in full working order, given that there were 344 individual single-point opportunities for failure.

It is testament to the engineering excellence and collaboration of over 1,200 scientists, engineers and technologists from at least 14 different countries. It represents the best of what humanity can achieve when focusing on a long-term cooperative endeavour for a purely scientific cause that was over 20 years in the making.

But what of China’s aspirations for space science? Much is happening and planned across the Chinese space programme.

This includes the successful Zhu Rong rover landing on Mars in May last year and the impressive Chang’e lunar missions, especially the Chang’e 4 rover that landed on the far side of the moon in 2019 – a feat no other nation has accomplished – and the Chang’e 5 lander in late 2020 that brought back 1.7kg of moon rock.

China is only the third country to return lunar samples after the United States (six Apollo missions brought back a total of 382kg of moon rock and other samples) and Russia, which brought back 300 grams of moon dust over three Luna missions. In addition to more Chang’e missions, there are also plans for a manned moon base, which is likely to become reality sooner than many Western observers expect.

01:42

China’s Chang’e 5 lunar lander finds water on the moon, but not as much as they hoped

Here, though, I focus on the new, hi-tech Chinese space station, Tiangong. On July 24, the first of Tiangong’s science modules, Wentian, was launched on board a Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket.

This 20-tonne module is the first of two, with the second, Mengtian, due for launch in October. Together, they will provide the main platform for a host of experiments from more than a dozen countries that are intended to take advantage of the microgravity environment.

China is expected to make fresh calls for a new round of experiments for the space station via the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. This is true to the country’s January white paper which alluded to the peaceful exploitation and exploration of space.

01:29

China’s Shenzhou 14 mission begins mission to finish the Tiangong space station

I am also looking forward to the prospects of the Chinese co-orbiting optical space telescope module, Xuntian, slated for launch in late 2023. It features a main mirror with a 2-metre diameter for optical and ultraviolet astronomy.

It is a facility like the Hubble Space Telescope, but with a field of view more than 300 times greater. This sets it apart as a next generation, space-based, wide-field survey telescope of astonishing capability. It will be available years before the planned Nasa equivalent, the Nancy Grace Roman 2.4 metre space telescope, due for launch in 2027, the same size as Hubble but with a view 100 times greater.

Xuntian’s wide field of view of the universe will allow it to map up to 40 per cent of the sky over 10 years using its huge 2.5 billion-pixel camera. Importantly, as Xuntian will be orbiting close to China’s space station, astronauts can visit to carry out maintenance, repairs, refuelling, upgrades or to replace entire instruments, as was necessary for Hubble to even get it to work properly and which had to be done via the space shuttle.

The Hubble Space Telescope drifts over the Earth after its release on May 19, 2009. China’s Xuntian space telescope, slated for launch in 2023, has a field of view 300 times that of Hubble. Photo: EPA-EFE

From the 1950s to the 1980s, two kinds of optical ground-based telescopes took part in a pasa doble cosmic dance. There were, for the period, a class of telescopes with main mirrors measuring around 4 metres in diameter with small fields of view, like the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

In tandem, there were smaller 2-metre-class Schmidt telescopes with 60 square degree fields of view that performed surveys of the entire sky in different colours over several years, like the 1.8-metre UK Schmidt telescope located on the same mountain in Australia as the Anglo-Australian Telescope.

It was these survey telescopes that told the larger telescopes where to look to undertake deeper and more detailed investigations and that led to so many exciting discoveries.

01:28

Nasa offers deepest-ever look in space, the farthest humanity has ever seen in time and distance

I believe a similar opportunity awaits the Xuntian and James Webb telescopes. Xuntian can provide the unprecedented wide field surveys at Hubble-type resolutions and depth to help show James Webb where to look and make discoveries. Even though these two telescopes focus on different main optical and near-infrared wavelengths they can still form a very powerful synergistic partnership.

So there is a potentially wonderful development – global pure science from mutually beneficial collaboration using world-class facilities from China and the US to see the universe (and maybe ourselves) in a better light. Perhaps a scientific detente here could foster broader understanding, too. Now that really would be worth seeing.

Quentin Parker is an astrophysicist based at the University of Hong Kong and director of its Laboratory for Space Research