On June 22, 2024, China successfully launched the Space Variable Objects Monitor, a space science satellite jointly developed by China and France, into its preset orbit at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. Photo: CCTV News
China successfully launched the Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM), a space science satellite developed by China and France, into its preset orbit on Saturday in what mission insiders and space observers said Sunday was a typical example of space cooperation. between a great Western country and an Asian power.
The Global Times has learned from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) that China launched its Long March 2C launch vehicle at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province on Saturday at 3:00 p.m.
The satellite is currently the world’s most powerful multi-band comprehensive gamma-ray burst observation satellite and will play a significant role in scientific discoveries in the field of space astronomy, including gamma-ray burst (GRB) research, CNSA explained in a statement provided to the Global Times.
The SVOM project is a collaboration established in 2014 and the second satellite collaboration between China and France, following the Sino-French Oceanographic Satellite, which was launched into orbit in 2018 and put into operation.
SVOM is designed to hunt short-lived and extremely violent cosmic explosions known as gamma-ray bursts by detecting high-energy electromagnetic radiation in the X-ray and gamma-ray regions.
To achieve this goal, Chinese scientists and engineers developed a pair of instruments for the satellite. They are the Gamma-Ray Monitor for measuring the spectrum of emission from GRBs and the Visible Telescope, which will look for light emitted at optical wavelengths immediately after a gamma-ray burst.
Meanwhile, the French side provided SVOM with the ECLAIR telescope and the microchannel X-ray telescope.
The satellite platform on which the parts are mounted was also developed by the Chinese side. The platform will provide the satellite with high stability and autonomous control while searching for weak signals in space.
The satellite is also powered by China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which is capable of using BDS short message services as well as France’s VHF network, so SVOM can send a warning signal back to the ground station within five minutes afterwards. detects a GRB event to alert ground-based large-aperture telescopes around the world, as well as other GRB satellites such as SWIFT to observe such an event, Global Times learned from the project’s developers.
The Chinese SVOM team told the Global Times that they look forward to further cooperation with their French colleagues in the future.
France has extensive experience in space astronomy, oceanography and atmospheric monitoring. We hope to deepen cooperation with them in these areas and even in the exploration of planets outside the solar system, one team member said.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and France. Over the past 60 years, China and France have engaged in practical space cooperation, CNSA said.
The successful implementation of the China-France SVOM project serves as an excellent example of the deep cooperation in aerospace between the two countries, CNSA said, citing other cooperation milestones achieved in recent years, such as CFOSat launched in 2018 and France’s Radon. detector on board the Chinese Chang’e-6 spacecraft, which landed on the far side of the moon in 2024.
Western media immediately pointed out that the SVOM project is based on a partnership between the French and Chinese space agencies and other scientific and technical groups from both countries. However, such level of space cooperation between the West and China is considered “relatively unusual, especially since the United States banned all cooperation between NASA and Beijing in 2011,” AFP reported.
“American concerns about technology transfer have greatly hindered American allies from working with the Chinese, but occasionally it happens,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US, told AFP.
So while SVOM is “by no means unique,” it remains “significant” in the context of China-Western space cooperation, McDowell added.
Chinese space watchers said SVOM served as the latest notable example of high-level space cooperation between a Western power and China and showed China’s openness in space, which is in stark contrast to domestic US legislation such as the Wolf Amendment, which prevents normal exchanges and dialogue between Chinese and US space agencies.
The hope is that the US might change course, abandon its hostile stance towards China and abandon its strategy of containing China. Only in this way, according to them, can a new starting point for cooperation between China and the US in the field of space be created.
If these two countries can really work together, it will benefit the world and promote community building with a common future for mankind. The key is for the US to abandon its ambition to dominate the world and drop the series of hostile measures it has taken against China to achieve that ambition, they noted.
An experimental satellite of the Chasing All Transients Constellation Hunters mission was also launched on Saturday, according to Zhang Shuangnan, a senior researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is also one of the initiators of the SVOM project and deputy chief scientist of the project, who led the development of one of the two participating Chinese instruments.
The satellite is a constellation comprising hundreds of cubesats, each equipped with lightweight LIGA-Micro-Slot-Optics designed for highly sensitive soft X-ray focusing. This constellation includes three types of cubesats—imaging, spectral timing, and polarization—each carrying different focal plane detectors. This mission will significantly boost research on transient phenomena such as black holes, neutron stars and high-energy neutrinos.
Zhang told the Global Times on Sunday that the experimental satellite is also part of Sino-French cooperation, and is also part of the discussion on future cooperation between the two countries. “If implemented, the sky will be filled with SVOM-like satellites.”