THE NEW SPACE RACE: New Chinese space telescope will ‘outdo Hubble’, researchers claim.

The spacecraft is called Xuntian, known as the Chinese Survey Space Telescope or the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST). The name “Xuntian” can be literally translated as “surveying the sky” or “survey of the heavens.”

Scheduled for launch next year, the bus-sized CSST houses a two-meter (6.6 foot) diameter primary mirror. This ultraviolet-optical space telescope is to co-orbit with the country’s Tiangong space station. It has a nominal mission lifetime of 10 years, but the observatory’s space duties could be extended.

Xuntian is designed to outdo NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This large orbiting facility is to orbit near China’s space station where it can be overhauled from time to time by Chinese spacewalkers.

Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency, has stated that the Xuntian in-orbit observatory is expected to make breakthroughs in cosmology, dark matter and dark energy, the Milky Way galaxy and other neighboring galaxies, star formation and evolution and exoplanets.

That’s a tall order.

Lin said that the high-resolution telescope will take deep-field survey observations with an area of 17,500 square degrees, as well as make fine observations of different types of celestial bodies. Xuntian is endowed with a 2.5 billion pixel camera.

Impressive. Can’t wait to see the results. But it does make you wonder just how good Chinese spy satellites are.