As US astronomers cheer the completion of the state-of-the-art project to rejuvenate the iconic Hale Telescope, one key collaborator is locked out of the celebrations and banned from exporting to the United States.
The Next Generation Palomar Spectrograph (NGPS) has given the 76-year-old telescope at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory an unmatched ability to capture fainter objects and reveal unprecedented details of the universe.
Mansi Kasliwal at Caltech, the project’s principal investigator, said the NGPS – which splits light, much like a prism, to uncover the age, distance, chemical make-up and other properties of celestial bodies – “blows the old one out of the water”.
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“It’s the most efficient of any comparable instrument working at other telescopes,” she said.
The NGPS was jointly developed in a unique partnership of American and Chinese institutions that included Caltech and an institute which designs and manufactures spectrographs, reflecting mirrors and other optical components in eastern China.
The Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology (NIAOT) shipped the finished spectrograph to the United States in 2023 and not long afterwards was added to the US government’s export blacklist.
According to the Commerce Department at the time, the addition was based on concerns that NIAOT was procuring US items for potential military applications. Questions from the South China Morning Post about the specific items involved were not responded to.
David Zweig, a professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, noted that many technologies can potentially serve both civilian and military purposes. “Almost everything in science can be dual-use,” he said.
A source, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Post that the timing of the NGPS delivery “was lucky enough” to narrowly avoid the blacklisting. The entity list, while focused on export restrictions, also applies to in-country transfers.
The NGPS partnership included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation on the US side, along with Peking University’s Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the National Astronomical Observatories of China.
The US team contributed detectors, electronics and software for the instrument, while China was responsible for developing the instrument’s optics, in exchange for 10 observation nights annually for Chinese astronomers for the first five years of the NGPS.
Shri Kulkarni, a senior Caltech astronomer and one of the project’s initiators, also highlighted the NGPS’ impact. “The telescope can now finish observation in one-third of a night what it used to take a whole night to do, so it’s a big deal,” he said.
Kulkarni praised the collaboration with China, pointing to NIAOT’s engineering expertise and Beijing’s skilled astronomers. “You had engineers in Nanjing who know how to build telescopes and astronomers in Beijing who know how to use them – it’s a nice combination.”
He acknowledged that such partnerships have become nearly impossible because of the high geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing, noting that it is now US government policy to exclude China from many projects, with legal consequences for scientists who do not comply.
“As citizens of this country, we will follow the rules of this country,” Kulkarni said.
Despite the challenges, Kulkarni stressed the global nature of science. “If I use a telescope to find something tonight, no one can say, ‘we reject it because you’re from China’. That’s not how science works,” he said.
Kulkarni, who worked closely with Chinese colleagues for more than a decade, also reflected on China’s rapid progress in astronomy.
“When I was growing up, China and India were probably similar in astronomy. Fifty years later, the trajectories are extremely different. China is making excellent progress in many areas,” he said, adding that it needs to remain open to international collaboration.
“The US has benefited enormously by attracting talent from around the world. China needs to continue engaging globally, because not all the talent will be found at home.”
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