China Fuyan (asteroid defense radar)

2022: Start of construction of asteroid protection radar

In mid-July 2022, construction began on an active high-definition long-range space surveillance facility codenamed China Fuyan in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing (China). The project is designed to protect the Earth from space threats, an array of more than 20 large radar antennas will track dangerous asteroids.

The object will include distributed radars with more than 20 antennas, each of which will have a diameter of 25 to 30 m. The Beijing Institute of Technology said that these antennas will be combined to conduct high-resolution observations of asteroids within a radius of 150 million km. An array of many antennas will become, according to the authors, the most powerful radar on Earth.

Array of more than 20 large radar antennas to track dangerous asteroids

With the help of China Fuyan, Chinese scientists hope to meet the needs of China, in the means of defense of near-Earth space and space sensing of the country, as well as for conducting research on near-Earth space. Various organizations are working together to create the project, including the Beijing Institute of Technology Innovation Center in Chongqing, the National Astronomical Observatories of China at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University and Peking University.

Unlike pre-existing projects such as the FAST radio telescope, China Fuyan will not only receive data, but send a radio signal to use reflected waves to analyze outer space. The developers say that as of July 2022, the construction of the first two array antennas has been completed, which will be put into operation and tested in September 2022. A ground-based and space-based asteroid monitoring and warning system will also be created to catalogue and analyze asteroids that could threaten human space activities. The report notes that technologies will be developed to counter these threats.

The China Fuyan radar will help China explore the territory between the Earth and the moon, including finding a suitable landing site for the Tianwen-2 probe. The probe will conduct observations and return samples from near-Earth asteroid 2016HO3 over a ten-year mission.^[1]

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