China announces plans for space-ground asteroid early-warning network
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced on International Asteroid Day, June 30, plans for a comprehensive space-ground asteroid early-warning network, a system combining ground-based telescopes, deep-space radar, and orbital assets that could dramatically accelerate the discovery and tracking of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.
The announcement, reported in detail by Space.com, positions China to become a leading player in planetary defense, a domain currently dominated by NASA’s ATLAS and upcoming NEO Surveyor missions and ESA’s NEOMIR and Hera programs.
The ground component
The ground segment consists of multiple large-aperture optical telescopes at strategically selected sites, linked to the Fuyan (Compound Eye) radar near Chongqing in southwest China. The Fuyan project, led by the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) under President Long Teng, is already the most ambitious ground-based planetary radar ever conceived.
Fuyan’s Phase 1 — four 16-meter antennas — was completed in December 2022 and demonstrated capability by producing the first ground-based 3D radar image of lunar craters. Phase 2, currently under construction, will consist of 25 radar units each with a 30-meter aperture, spanning approximately 20 hectares, and will be able to detect and image asteroids as small as tens of meters across at a distance of 10 million kilometers. Phase 3, should it proceed, would expand to more than 100 units with a detection range of 150 million kilometers — the entire inner solar system.
If completed, Fuyan would be the world’s only deep-space planetary radar. The Arecibo Observatory’s 305-meter dish, which served as the global reference for asteroid radar imaging until its collapse in 2020, has not been replaced.
The space component
The orbital segment of the network is planned around up to four candidate positions, as outlined by Wu Weiren of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration (June 2026):
1. Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point — 1.5 million kilometers inside Earth’s orbit, the same position planned for NASA’s NEO Surveyor and ESA’s NEOMIR
2. Earth-leading or trailing orbit — a few million kilometers ahead or behind Earth along its orbital path
3. Venus-like heliocentric orbit — based on the earlier CROWN proposal (Constellation of Heterogeneous Wide-field Near-Earth Object Surveyors), which would deploy six surveyor spacecraft in Venus-like orbits with a parent spacecraft at a Sun-Venus Lagrange point for relay communications
4. Distant retrograde orbit (DRO) — a stable, distant orbit around Earth
The Venus-like orbit positions are of particular interest because they would allow detection of asteroids approaching from the sunward direction — the same blind spot that allowed the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor to go undetected. Ground-based telescopes cannot look toward the Sun; space-based assets at L1 or in Venus-like orbits can.
The gap it would fill
Current global asteroid detection capability has significant gaps. Approximately 45% of 140-meter-class asteroids — the “country-killer” size — have been detected, and fewer than half of the estimated 100,000 near-Earth objects large enough to cause significant local damage have known orbits. ATLAS, the most prolific current survey, uses five 0.5-meter telescopes spread across Hawaii, Chile, South Africa, and Spain, but has no space component and no radar capability.
China currently operates only one dedicated NEO telescope — the CNEOST, a 1.2-meter instrument at Xuyi, Jiangsu Province. The planned network would represent a step-change in capability.
Plans and timeline
Li Mingtao, chief scientist at CNSA’s Asteroid Monitoring and Early Warning Research Center, led the announcement. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, approved in March 2026, now formally includes an asteroid defense engineering project. A kinetic-impact demonstration mission — similar to NASA’s DART — is planned for 2027.
The timeline aligns with the International Year of Planetary Defense in 2029, when the asteroid Apophis will pass within geostationary orbit — a prime target for observation and potential flyby missions.
The open question
The value of any single-nation planetary defense system depends critically on data sharing. Anne Virkki of the University of Helsinki, a former Arecibo planetary radar scientist, noted that the system’s contribution to global defense depends on “whether it has some capability that the other two do not, and shares the data internationally.” Without open data, even the most capable system risks being an expensive silo rather than a global asset.
Sources:
1. Space.com. “China announces plan to build early-warning system for dangerous asteroids.” June 30, 2026. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/asteroid-comet-missions/china-announces-plan-to-build-early-warning-system-for-dangerous-asteroids
2. Wu, W. et al. “Orbital architectures for space-based NEO detection.” Journal of Deep Space Exploration (2026).
3. Beijing Institute of Technology / China Compound Eye (Fuyan) project updates, 2022–2026.