HONG KONG: The Chinese Survey Space Telescope, also known as the Chinese Space Station Telescope or Xuntian Space Telescope, is a space-based optical observatory that will allow astronomers to conduct surveys by capturing a general map or images of the sky.
The CSST is a bus-sized facility, whose length is equal to that of a three-story building.
Although it has an aperture of two metres, a little smaller than the Hubble Space Telescope, its field of view is 350 times larger than Hubble’s, according to Liu Jifeng, deputy director at the National Astronomical Observatories of China.
Li Ran, a project scientist at the CSST Scientific Data Reduction System, said, “The field of view is the area of the sky a telescope can see at one time.”
Hubble’s field of view is approximately 1% of the size of a fingernail at an arm’s length, thereby the telescope observed only a tiny fraction of the sky, Li added.
The CSST, which is still under construction, has a three-mirror anastigmat design that helps it achieve superior image quality within a large field of view, according to the researchers.
Moreover, it is a Cook-type, off-axis telescope without obstruction that can, in principle, achieve higher precision in photometry, position and shape measurements when properly sampled.
“It has an advantage for survey observations since it can scan a large part of the universe fairly quickly,” said Zhan Hu, a project scientist at the CSST Optical Facility.
The telescope will be equipped with five instruments, including a survey camera.
The main focal plane of the camera is equipped with 30 81-mega-pixel detectors that will take images and spectra of roughly 17,500 square degrees of the median-to-high galactic latitude and median-to-high ecliptic latitude sky in multiple bands, the researchers said.
- China Daily
Created by Tan KW | Mar 29, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Mar 29, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Mar 29, 2024
Created by Tan KW | Mar 29, 2024