(Newswire.net — August 16, 2016) — China launched the world’s first quantum satellite to secure communications in an age of global electronic surveillance.
A Long March 2D rocket took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on Tuesday at 1:40am local time on a two-year mission, Xinhua reports. The rocket took the 600-plus-kilogram Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) satellite which will be positioned along Earth’s orbit some 600 kilometers (373 miles) above the Earth.
The satellite will be positioned at sun-synchronous orbit at an angle of 97.79 degrees, allowing it to circle our planet once every 90 minutes, according to the Chinese news agency.
The satellite was nicknamed “Mencius” in honor of the 5th century B.C. philosopher and scientist who taught that “the good ruler would war, not against other countries, but against the common enemy – poverty, for it is out of poverty and ignorance that crime and disorder come.”
According to Pan Jianwei, chief scientist on the QUESS project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the satellite launch is a turning point which represents the Chinese transition from follower to leader in IT and communications.
“The newly-launched satellite marks a transition in China’s role – from a follower in classic information technology (IT) development to one of the leaders guiding future IT achievements,” Pan Jianwei told Xinhua.
Quantum communication is the teleportation of particles following the principles of “quantum entanglement,” the act of fusing two or more particles into complementary “quantum states.”
Operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the satellite contains a quantum key communicator, a processing unit, a laser communicator, a quantum entanglement emitter, and an entanglement source to transmit quantum keys to Earth.
What could easily qualify as the first step in reaching the “Star Trek” teleportation technology, the experiment that Chinese scientists hope to successfully achieve is to send a photo from the Quantum Satellite to two ground stations separated by about 1,200 kilometers (746 miles).
Allegedly, the Quantum communication encryption is a unique method of encoding the content of a message as quantum keys that are theoretically impossible to crack. However, it is still a mystery as to what would happen to the message between two communicators, if a third party tried to intercept it. The intrusion could change the message structure in an unpredictable way, according to scientists.
QUESS is one of the National Space Science Center’s “Strategic Priority Programs.” If QUESS is successful, China hopes to erect an Asian-European quantum key distribution network by 2020, and a global quantum communications network in 2030.