China receives message from satellite probing dark matter

China today said it has received "good quality" data from its first satellite searching for signals of dark matter, an invisible material that makes up most of the universe's mass.
A station in Kashgar in northwest China's Xinjiang successfully tracked and received data from the Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) Satellite at 8:45 AM local time yesterday.
It took about seven minutes to receive and record the information and the data was transferred to the National Space Science Center, according to a Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) statement.
The communication marks the establishment of a transmission link between the satellite and ground-based stations.

Ground stations in Beijing's Miyun and Sanya in south China's Hainan Province also tracked and received data from the satellite later yesterday.
Scientists examined the data and believe it to be in the "correct format and of good quality," CAS said.

Dark matter, which does not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation to be observed directly, is one of the huge mysteries of modern science.
Theorised by scientists who could not understand missing mass and strangely bent light in faraway galaxies, dark matter has become widely accepted in the physics community even though its existence has never been concretely proven.

Scientists now believe that only around five per cent of the total mass-energy of the known universe is made up of ordinary matter - protons, neutrons, electrons - whereas dark matter and dark energy make up the rest.
The Dark Matter Particle Explorer Satellite, which has been given the moniker "Wukong" after the Monkey King from the Chinese classical fiction "Journey to the West," was launched on December 17 on a Long March 2-D rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre.
The satellite is designed to undertake a three-year space mission, but scientists hope it could last five.