At the main forum of the annual meeting of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST) held in Hefei City, Anhui Province, China, on October 22, Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration project, director and chief scientist of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL), and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), introduced China’s plans for deep space exploration in the next 15 years.
Academician Wu revealed that in the next 15 years, China’s deep space exploration will demonstrate the implementation of ten major engineering tasks in three areas, including lunar exploration, planetary exploration, and transportation technology.
Specifically, these include: Chang’e VI/VII/VIII Lunar Exploration Project Phase IV, International Lunar Scientific Research Station, manned lunar landing, Magpie Bridge Teleconducting Remote Integrated Constellation System, Tianwen II Asteroid Sampling and Detection, Near-Earth Asteroid Defense, Tianwen III Mars Sampling, Jupiter Galaxy and Interplanetary Transit Detection, and Solar System Marginal Detection.
In the field of transportation, China will demonstrate the implementation of the heavy-lift launch vehicle project, breakthroughs in key technologies such as 10-meter-class rocket body diameter and high-thrust liquid-oxygen methane engines, so as to raise China’s near-Earth orbit launch capacity from 25 tons to 150 tons, laying a solid foundation for future deep-space exploration.
Among them, the defense of near-Earth asteroid party, will be for near-Earth asteroid impact on the Earth, a very small probability, a great danger of the event, a tens of millions of kilometers of asteroid implementation of kinetic energy impact, so that it changes the orbit, and on-orbit to carry out the assessment of the effect of the impact.
Prior to this, Chen Qi, director of China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory System Research Institute, had disclosed the development blueprint of near-Earth asteroid defense, planning to achieve a kinetic energy impact on an asteroid in 2030, and to realize the push-off deflection during 2030-2035, and to have preliminary asteroid orbit control capability before 2045.
Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the National Space Administration, said that China will begin to set up a near-Earth asteroid defense system to jointly respond to the threat of near-Earth asteroid impacts, contributing Chinese power to protect the Earth and human security.
China’s first near-Earth asteroid defense mission is expected to achieve three major scientific goals:
The first is to reveal the dynamical evolution law of the impact target and detect the orbital characteristics of the target asteroid.
The second is to reveal the intrinsic properties of the impact target and to detect the shape, size, composition and structure of the target asteroid.
The third is to reveal the impact momentum transfer law, and carry out research on wall impact effects such as terrain changes and spatter distribution.
On September 27, 2022, NASA conducted the first asteroid defense exercise in human history, using a satellite named “DART” to impact a 160-meter-diameter asteroid 11 million kilometers away and change its orbit.