NEWS POST: China Launches World First Quantum Satellite

China launched the world's first quantum satellite on Tuesday, state media reported, in an effort to harness the power of particle physics to build an "unhackable" system of encrypted communications.

The launch took place at 1:40 am in the southwestern Gobi Desert, the official Xinhua news service said, and comes as the US, Japan and others also seek to develop applications for the burgeoning technology.

Beijing has poured enormous resources into the race, one of several cutting edge projects the world's second largest economy has pursued as part of its massive national investment in advanced scientific research, on everything from asteroid mining to gene manipulation.

The satellite -- nicknamed Micius after a 5th century BC Chinese philosopher and scientist -- will be used in experiments intended to prove the viability of quantum technology to communicate over long distances.

It will also further investigations into some of the more unusual properties of sub-atomic particles, including "quantum entanglement", Xinhua said.

The term describes what Albert Einstein described as the "spooky" phenomenon of particles exerting influence on each other at a distance, including the ability for paired particles to mirror each other at faster-than-light speeds.

Unlike traditional secure communication methods, China's proposed system uses photons to send the encryption keys necessary to decode information.

The data contained in the bursts of subatomic particles is impossible to intercept: any attempts at eavesdropping will cause them to self-destruct, Xinhua said, letting users know that their communications have been compromised.

Scientists have shown the trick can be used to transmit messages over relatively short distances: the current record is around 300 kilometres, according to an article in the journal Nature.

But technical hurdles have kept long-range communication out of reach.

China's quantum satellite, nicknamed Micius after a 5th century BC Chinese scientist, blasts off from the Jiuquan launch centre in north-west Gansu province on August 16, 2016 ©- (AFP)

- A coin from a plane -

The satellite will attempt to send secure messages between Beijing and Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang in the country's far west.

Success will require the satellite is precisely oriented to its earth-bound receiving stations, Xinhua said.

"It will be like tossing a coin from a plane at 100,000 metres above the sea level exactly into the slot of a rotating piggy bank," it quoted the project's chief commander, Wang Jianyu, as saying.

Developing the new technology is a major goal for Beijing, which included it in its most recent five-year plan, released in March.

"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," Xinhua quoted Pan Jianwei, the satellite project's chief scientist.

China "can expect a global network of quantum communications to be set up around 2030", he said.

Beijing had previously identified the development of quantum technology as a national priority.

But Edward Snowden's revelations of spying operations by the US National Security Agency heightened China's pursuit of spy-proof methods.

The country is also one of several working on building the world's first quantum computer, which would use sub-atomic particles' properties in processors that can operate at speeds far faster than current technologies allow.

Meanwhile RT News reports that the world’s first quantum communications satellite has been launched into orbit aboard a Long March-2D rocket. The main task of the Chinese satellite is to potentially secure communications in an age of cyberattacks and global electronic surveillance.

The 600-plus-kilogram Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) satellite took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gobi Desert at 1:40am local time on a two-year mission on Tuesday.

Nicknamed "Micius," in honor of the fifth century B.C. Chinese philosopher and scientist, QUESS will be positioned at sun-synchronous orbit, some 600 kilometers (373 miles) above the Earth at an angle of 97.79 degrees, allowing it circle our planet once every 90 minutes.

“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,” said Pan Jianwei, chief scientist of QUESS project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as quoted by Xinhua.

The satellite has been tasked with testing out a potentially uncrackable communications system. QUESS will explore quantum teleportation by sending out keys from space to ground command using the principle of “quantum entanglement,” an act of fusing two or more particles into complementary “quantum states.”

In practice, China hopes to send out photons from the satellite to two ground stations separated by about 1,200 kilometers (746 miles), which together form one entangled system. Operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the satellite contains a quantum key communicator, a processing unit, a laser communicator, quantum entanglement emitter, and entanglement source to transmit quantum keys to Earth.

Quantum communication encryption is a unique method of encoding the content of a message as quantum keys are theoretically impossible to crack with the system detecting any intrusion attempts. For instance, when two people share an encrypted quantum message, if a third person intercepts it, it will change in an unpredictable way.

China hopes that the experimental quantum encryption programs will be instrumental in addressing information security concerns when the government, military, and financial networks are becoming prime targets for espionage.

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.

“If China is going to send more quantum communication satellites into orbit, we can expect a global network of quantum communications to be set up around 2030,” said Pan.

NEWS POST: China To Create World’s First Quantum Info Teleport In 2016

© nersc.gov

A group of Chinese scientists plans to create a quantum space communications system for the first time ever by launching a satellite that could facilitate quantum teleportation of photons between earth and space this June.

The aim of the new experiment conducted by a team led by physicist Pan Jian-Wei from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei is to see if the quantum property of entanglement extends over record-breaking distances of more than 1,000 kilometers.

This could potentially facilitate super-fast, long-range communications, as well as lead to the creation of unbreakable quantum communication networks.

The team also wants to use the world’s first quantum satellite to find out if it is possible to teleport information securely between Earth and space using entangled photons. The launch of the satellite is scheduled for June, the international weekly of science Nature reports.

“In principle, quantum entanglement can exist for any distance. But we want to see if there is some physical limit… we hope to build some sort of macroscopic system in which we can show that the quantum phenomena can still exist,” Pan told Nature, in describing the theoretical premises for the experiment.

The satellite’s first mission would involve establishing a cryptographic communication line between Beijing and Vienna by creating “[the encoding and sharing of a secret cryptographic key using the quantum properties of photons] between a ground station in Beijing and the satellite, and between the satellite and Vienna.”

Scientists then plan to conduct satellite entangled photon quantum teleportation between stations located in the Chinese cities of Delingha and Lijiang or Nanshan, which are separated by more than 1,200 kilometers. The team has already conducted successful tests at a distance of 100 kilometers.

According to Pan, the technology is based on beaming one photon from an entangled pair to a distant location and then teleporting the quantum state of a third photon using the entangled photon as a conduit.

Pan already won a major national Chinese science prize (worth 200,000 yuan, or US$30,000) earlier in January for the breakthrough research in quantum physics that facilitated the launch of the experiment involving the first quantum satellite.

In the future, Pan also hopes to create a signal transmitting system that could facilitate communication between the Earth and the Moon.

“In the future, we also want to see if it is possible to distribute entanglement between Earth and the Moon. We hope to use the [China’s Moon program] to send a quantum satellite to one of the gravitationally-stable points in the Earth-Moon system,” he told the weekly.

The team’s future plans also include making use of China’s future space station, Tiangong, which is expected to be created by the end of the decade, to conduct “upgraded” quantum experiments.

“I think China has an obligation not just to do something for ourselves — many other countries have been to the Moon, have done manned spaceflight — but to explore something unknown,” Pen said.

The scientist also predicted that the world will soon enter a quantum era with a revolution in quantum physics taking the world by storm and leading to the creation of super-fast quantum computers and large quantum communication networks, China’s People’s Daily reported.

Originally published (STORY 1) in AFP, (STORY 2) in RT and (STORY 3) in RT.