China starts building world’s first deep-space radar to prevent potential asteroid impact

Asia-Pacific, News July 12, 2022 , by IRIA No Comments

China has begun construction of a ground-based active observation radar facility in Chongqing, where the world’s first deep-space radar will be built as part of China’s efforts to prevent potential asteroid impacts.

This facility would accommodate the world’s most far-reaching radar system that can penetrate into outer space and detect space threats, such as near-Earth asteroids while boosting the country’s space exploration capabilities.

The new observation facility is being built in the southwest of Chongqing municipality and it has been named Fuyan, which translates to ‘Facetted Eye’. The radar system would consist of more than 20 antennas and each 15 to 30 meters in diameter. Based on the scale of the antennas and their collective working capabilities, the system can detect space objects and asteroids from distances as far as 150 million kilometers.

The project is jointly headed by the Chongqing Innovation center of the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) and the National Astronomical Observatories of the China Academy of Sciences. Tsinghua University and Peking University are also among the collaborative bodies working on the project.

The Fuyan facility is the first project that has been put in construction after China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced its plan to build near-Earth asteroid monitoring and defense system in April 2022. Other plans under the same program include the development and production of asteroid-impacting spacecraft to put an asteroid off of its trajectory and act as the first line of defense against incoming asteroids.

*^{A concept image of super-large distributed aperture radar of high-resolution deep-space observation facility of China Fuyan project. (Image Credit: BIT/CGTN)}*

China plans to use its ground-based monitoring and warning system to build a catalog of all the near-Earth asteroids with tendencies to enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The new space radar facility would also help CNSA’s Tianwen-2 mission which has already entered the prototype research and development phase. Tianwen-2 is a decade-long mission focused on collecting observational data from a near-Earth asteroid named Kamo’oalewa (2016HO3), which is a blasted-off piece of our moon and is often dubbed as earth’s second moon.

Four 16-meter-wide radar systems have been built at the Fuyan observation facility. These four radars would make the facility operational by September 2022 for the first stage of its proceedings. In the second phase, the number of antennas would be increased to 20 which would allow the system to detect, probe, and image asteroids from several million kilometers away.

In the third stage of the program, the Fuyan observation facility would be able to enhance its observational abilities to 150 million kilometers. It would be the world’s first deep-space radar with the capability to carry out 3D imaging and dynamic monitoring as well as active observation of celestial bodies.

**ALSO READ: NASA launches Spacecraft on a ‘Suicide Mission’ to Kick Asteroid Off Course**

In November 2021, NASA also launched a Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART spacecraft with the same ambitions. DART is NASA’s $330 million spacecraft that has been built with the sole purpose to hit a wandering asteroid in order to bring a small change in its trajectory and put it off course.