The space antenna array system at a ground station in Kashi, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Northwest China Photo: Xi’an Satellite Control Center
The China-developed 70-meter reflector antenna, the largest in Asia, completed acceptance checks on Thursday and is ready to be used for the country’s first Mars mission, Tianwen-1, which is approaching the Red Planet and is expected to take its course soon. in.
The antenna, specifically designed for the Mars reconnaissance project, has the task of receiving data from Tianwen-1 about 400 million kilometers from Earth, and plays an important role in the mission, experts said.
The high-performance antenna, delivered to the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is 72 meters high and weighs 2,700 tons. It consists of 1,328 high-precision panels and is about the size of ten basketball courts, and the main reflector’s diameter is up to 70 meters wide, reports CCTV News.
The existing diameters are between 35 meters and 50 meters, but the large distance between Earth and Mars means that it is not large enough to meet the requirements for data collection.
As a result, Chinese scientists have designed a telescope with an even larger antenna that will work with the other three existing in Beijing and Kunming in Yunnan Province in southwest China to receive signals from Mars.
Tianwen-1 is now racing to its destination at a distance of 170 million kilometers from Earth. It is expected to arrive in the red planet’s gravitational field, perform a brake maneuver and enter Mars orbit around February 10, a day before Chinese New Year’s Eve.
Several payloads aboard the spacecraft will be switched on one after the other and return data, meaning the “busiest working hours” for the antenna have come, Wang Yanan, editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine in Beijing, told the Global Times . Thursday.
The ability to receive this data is crucial to the success of China’s first Mars explosion mission, said Li Chunlai, a deputy chief designer of the project. “To make it clearer, returning data is like shining a laser pointer on sin on earth,” CCTV News described.
As the transmission distance increases, the signal, originally a point at the end of the probe, becomes a circular surface that is often amplified by the time it reaches the earth, while also diluting the density of the signal, Li said. explain.
“In addition to the size of the antenna, another important factor is the accuracy in detecting signal direction,” Wang added. If the antenna can not adjust its angle in the direction of the direction, it can not receive data.