Submission + - China's space science prepares for liftoff (aip.org)
Engineer Murad writes: "In unveiling its five-year plan for 2006-10 this past March, the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that the HXMT had won a competition for funding, beating out a proposal for the Solar Space Telescope (SST). A host of other astronomical projects are funded for various stages of R&D.
Scheduled for launch in 2010, the HXMT will survey the sky in the 20-250 keV range. "In this energy band, it should be the most sensitive instrument so far for a full-sky survey," says project coleader Shuang Nan Zhang, who splits his time between Tsinghua University and the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. "It will take a year to scan the whole sky," he adds.
In addition to a hard x-ray survey instrument, the mission will carry two lower-energy detectors — capable of observing from 1 keV to 30 keV — for pointed observations. Possible targets for such observations include neutron-star-black-hole binaries, active galactic nuclei, supernova remnants, soft gamma-ray burst repeaters, and galaxy clusters. "With all the detectors pointed at the same source," Zhang says, "we can look at sources with broadband spectra and rapid variability — like a high-energy version of RXTE [NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer]."
China is providing the launcher, spacecraft, and hard and medium x-ray detectors, while a low-energy detector will be built jointly with scientists in the UK.
Unspecified budget
Zhang estimates the HXMT price tag at about $100 million. "It's pretty cheap by international standards," he says. "But in China it's a megaproject. It's the [country's] largest astronomy project ever." The country's manned space program and lunar exploration plans — an orbiter will be launched this fall to map the Moon's surface, followed by landers and rovers that will carry out experiments and bring back samples — are larger, but they are not pure astronomy programs; the manned program is not under the CNSA.
The total budget for space science is unspecified, says Zhang, one of the architects of the CNSA five-year plan. "The government does not give us a budget. There is no cap. We tell them our needs. We say, 'It's been approved, please fund.' "
In the past, decisions about space missions in China have been made at top government levels. This time, with peer review, the people whose missions lost out were of course disappointed. But, says Zhang, the reaction from the community about using peer review has been positive. "Everyone is a winner because we have established the correct procedure.""
