China's Purple Mountain Observatory Signs Telescope Project Agreements
According to TapTechNews on May 29, the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the government of the Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province signed a cooperation agreement for the 4.2-meter ground-based dedicated astrometric telescope project on May 26.
In addition, the Purple Mountain Observatory and the Haixi Prefecture government had previously signed a co-construction framework agreement for the submillimeter-wave astronomical observation base, and will build an international leading 15-meter submillimeter-wave telescope in the Snowy Pasture 150 kilometers northwest of Delingha City, Haixi Prefecture.
On the same day, the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the government of the Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province also signed a cooperation agreement for the 2.5-meter multi-terminal general telescope project simultaneously.
According to the official introduction, this telescope is oriented towards independently building China's celestial sphere space-time reference, especially accurately mastering the orbits of the major planets, dwarf planets, natural satellites, and asteroids in the solar system, independently establishing and continuously maintaining high-precision ephemerides of solar system celestial bodies, serving the needs of aerospace activities and deep space exploration.
Ping Yiding, a senior engineer at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced that China currently does not have an astronomical telescope with a caliber of the 4-meter level, and there is no large-caliber general precision measurement equipment in the planning.
The 4.2-meter ground-based dedicated astrometric telescope is optimized for high-precision astrometry of solar system celestial bodies. With an investment of about 300 million RMB (about 43 million US dollars), after completion, it will be the largest general precision measurement telescope in China and the largest dedicated astrometric telescope in the world, and can also widely serve various astronomical scientific goals.
TapTechNews found out that the Lenghu Astronomical Observation Base is located in the Saishiteng Mountain area in Lenghu Town, Mangya City, Haixi Prefecture, Qinghai Province on the northwest edge of the Qaidam Basin, with an average altitude of about 4000 meters (about 13123 feet). Its astronomical observation conditions belong to the world-class level.
The official pointed out that the Lenghu site has broken the bottleneck that has long restricted the development of optical astronomical observation in China, filled the blank of a world-class optical astronomical observation site in the eastern hemisphere, and provided extremely precious strategic scarce resources for constituting a complete time-domain and space-domain observation network globally and promoting the development of international optical astronomy.