In December, the mainland will use the Long March 5B carrier rocket to launch the Sky Survey optical telescope, which will be the last module of the first phase of the mainland space station. Although it is a "module", in fact, the "sky survey" will operate in the form of co-orbit with the space station, and will dock with the space station as long as it needs to be replenished and maintained, which is a major initiative of mainland aerospace.
The Sky Survey is coming
Recently, the National Museum hall publicly exhibited many aerospace exhibits on the mainland, including a very delicate scaled model of the "Sky Survey" optical module. How delicate is it? If you look at it, even the control moment gyroscope on each quadrant of the optical cabin can be seen clearly, of which the third quadrant is equipped with two, and the other quadrants are equipped with one each. In addition, the cabin shell also has a large number of RCS attitude adjustment engine nozzles and robotic arm pair interfaces, as well as rigid connection pair interfaces.
And the details of the propulsion module accessory package are matched with the previously officially released pictures, indicating that the "sky survey" has indeed entered the formal stage. Previously, its assembly site was exposed on the Internet, and it was black like a boiler, which attracted many people's ridicule, but in fact, it was only the first sample, and foreign countries are so simple, and if you look at the current appearance, will you blush for your ignorance?
This is the skeleton
This is the initial model
This is the right thing
In addition, on the model of the National Expo, you can also see that there are dense handrails, which can be described as full of details, but many people are curious, isn't the "sky survey" unmanned to accompany the flight? Why are there so many handrails for astronauts climbing. In fact, as mentioned earlier, when the "sky survey" needs to be replenished and repaired, it will dock with the space station, and the robotic arm or astronauts will carry out extravehicular operations, and then the handrail will play a role.
Not only that, the "sky survey" can also dock with cargo or manned spacecraft alone, without returning to the space station, at this time extravehicular walking is particularly important, the only thing astronauts rely on is such a handrail. In addition, considering the positioning and use of the "Sky Survey" optical module, it is estimated that it will not set up an airtight cabin, which means that all the work of astronauts must rely on walking outside the cabin to complete.
And this is the biggest difference between our "Sky Survey" optical module and the American "Hubble" telescope. From a technical point of view, hundreds of times the field of view and the extra 5.5 tons of weight are not the biggest advantages of the "Sky Survey", and the maintenance convenience brought by docking and climbing is the biggest advantage of the Sky Survey. In contrast, Hubble, although located in a higher 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit, has not been able to maintain it since the shuttle's retirement. It is said that this year SpaceX will launch a "Polar Bear-Dawn" tourist spacecraft, docking with "Hubble" in the name of private sightseeing and providing maintenance services, and it remains to be seen what the final outcome will be.
The Dragon spacecraft prepares for repairs to the Hubble telescope
In fact, the most original design of the "Sky Survey" is arranged in the "Mengtian" experimental module, there is a lifting design, when it is necessary to work, open the hatch, extend the telescope, after completing the work, retract the telescope, close the hatch, many space stations have a similar design. However, the vibration of the operation of the space station will affect the working accuracy of the telescope, so we finally made the companion flight mode, and the place where the telescope was originally arranged in the "Mengtian" module became an exposure experiment platform.
Inside the red frame is the location where the telescope was originally to be deployed
"Sky Survey" is gradually unveiled, is moving towards reality step by step, and it is only the beginning, the future continent will build more telescopes on its basis, such as "Webb" PLUS, lunar space and earth telescopes, they will be the same as "Sky Survey", with autonomous flight and separate docking maintenance functions.