China and France Launch Satellite to Study the Universe’s Mightiest Explosions

(CTN News) – A satellite constructed by France and China has launched on a search for the universe’s most powerful explosions, in a notable example of collaboration between a Western power and an Asian powerhouse.

China’s Long March 2C Rocket Launches SVOM Satellite

On Saturday, the 930kg (2,050-pound) satellite carrying four instruments – two French and two Chinese – launched from a base in Xichang, in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, aboard a Chinese Long March 2C rocket at around 3pm (07:00 GMT), according to state broadcaster CCTV.

The Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM), developed by engineers from both countries, will look for gamma-ray bursts whose light has traveled billions of light years to reach Earth.

Gamma-ray bursts are typically caused by the explosion of massive stars (more than 20 times the size of the sun) or the fusion of compact stars.

The incredibly bright cosmic beams can emit an amount of energy comparable to more than a billion suns.

Observing them is like “looking back in time, because the light from these objects takes a long time to reach us,” Ore Gottlieb, an astronomer at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, told AFP.

“SVOM has the potential to unravel several mysteries in the field of [gamma-ray bursts, GRBs], including detecting the most distant GRBs in the universe, which correspond to the earliest GRBs,” according to Gottlieb.

The most distant bursts found to date occurred just 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the cosmos was in its infancy.

When the satellite is in orbit 625 kilometers (388 miles) above the Earth, it will transmit data to observatories. When SVOM detects a burst, it sends an alert to a 24-hour monitoring crew.

Analysts believe that analysing the data will help them better comprehend the makeup of space and the behavior of gas clouds or other galaxies.

The fundamental problem is that gamma-ray bursts are exceedingly brief, putting scientists in a race against time to collect data.

This project resulted from a collaboration between the French and Chinese space agencies, as well as other scientific and technical entities from both countries.

Space cooperation at this level between the West and China is particularly unusual, especially since the United States barred all coordination between the US space agency NASA and Beijing in 2011.

“US concerns about technology transfer have kept US allies from collaborating with China, but it does happen on occasion,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States, told AFP.

So, while SVOM is “by no means unique,” it remains “significant” in the context of Chinese-Western space collaboration, according to McDowell.

China’s progress in space and lunar research is rapidly outperforming that of the United States, attracting partners from Europe and Asia as a result.

This month, China’s Chang’e-6 lunar mission delivered packages from the European Space Agency, Pakistani, French, and Italian research organizations to the moon’s far side.

China collaborates with countries like as Brazil, Egypt, and Thailand to develop and launch satellites.