BEIJING, June 13 -- Shanghai will be the headquarters
of the satellite positioning equipment used to track the country's first lunar
orbiter, due to be launched next April, officials said yesterday.
The lunar orbiter positioning system uses four radio
telescopes - in Shanghai, Beijing, Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan
Province, and Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the
northwest.
But it is in Shanghai that the data will be collected
and calculated.
In a rehearsal this month, China, in cooperation with
the European Space Agency, used the array to track the Smart-1 - an ESA lunar
orbiter that has been orbiting the moon since November 2004.
According to the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory,
the test was very successful and was an important warm-up ahead of the launch of
its own orbiter.
"The orbit position of lunar probe is key to
guaranteeing its normal functions in space, such as taking quality pictures of
the moon," Fu Chengqi, a researcher with the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory,
said yesterday.
In Shanghai, the positioning was achieved with a
radio dish atop Sheshan Hill in Songjiang District.
The dish collects the radio waves from the lunar
orbiter - about 400,000 kilometers away - and records the time they take to make
the trip.
At least three dishes on the ground are needed to
locate the lunar orbiter but the more that are used, the more precise the probe
positioning will be, officials said.
China has finished the plan of its first moon probe
and the orbiter, called Chang'e-1, will be launched next April.
Chang'e is a beautiful goddess living on the moon in
Chinese mythology.
The satellite, part of a three-stage program, will be
followed by the landing of an unmanned vehicle on the moon in 2010. Samples of
lunar soil will be collected in the final phase in 2020.
The satellite project was designed to obtain
three-dimensional images of the lunar surface, analyze elements and materials on
the surface and probe the depth of the lunar soil.
