China previews how powerful its new Xuntian space telescope will be ahead of 2027 launch (video)

China is getting close to launching a large space telescope to orbit along with its Tiangong space station, and scientists have just completed a full observation simulation in preparation.

The bus-sized Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST) — also known as Xuntian, or “surveying the heavens” — is being readied for a launch as soon as early 2027. It features a 6.6-foot-wide (2 meters) primary mirror, slightly smaller than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Xuntian will, however, be a much more capable sky survey instrument, according to Chinese space officials. It carries a 2.5-billion-pixel camera and boasts a field of view around 300 times larger than the venerable Hubble, surveying the sky from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths and delivering high spatial resolution imagery.

As preparations for launch enter the final stages, a collaborative Chinese research team built an end-to-end simulation suite to provide mock observations for both the telescope’s optical and other observation systems to replicate expected instrumental and observational conditions and evaluate the telescope’s overall performance. The results were published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics in early January.

The Chinese Space Station Telescope is expected to make major contributions to a range of fields, including cosmology, the study of galaxies, the evolution of the Milky Way and stars and planets. It could also provide insights into dark matter and dark energy, according to the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), which led the mock observation study.

After launch on a Long March 5B rocket, Xuntian will fly independently in low Earth orbit, but it will co-orbit with the Tiangong space station. As shown in a video published by China Central Television (CCTV), the spacecraft will be able to dock with Tiangong. Astronauts will then be able to conduct extravehicular activities, or spacewalks, to maintain, repair or even upgrade the observatory, as NASA astronauts did with Hubble five times between 1993 and 2009.