News / Brèves Energy of the Future / L’énergie du futur Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente The European Space Agency Will Have Its First Experiment on a Chinese Satellite Mission 13 December 2014 ESA is finalising its first experiment on a Chinese space mission: small containers of crude oil will help to improve our understanding of oil reservoirs buried kilometres underground. EIRNS—In 2006, European Space Agency Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain signed an agreement with China for space cooperation. The first experiment from ESA will fly on a nearly two-week Earth-orbital Chinese mission, with 19 other experiments, at the end of 2015. The SJ-10 Shijian spacecraft will come back to Earth, and the experiment will be returned to experts from ESA for analysis. The "Soret Coefficient in Crude Oil" experiment is a result of a partnership between ESA, China’s National Space Science Centre, France’s Total oil company, and China’s Petro-China company. The experiment will take six small cylinders of crude oil that are pressurized to 400 times normal atmospheric pressure, placing them in a "hypercritical" state. Some of the oil will be exposed to warmer temperatures, and some will be cooled. This is meant to simulate the increase in temperature the deeper you go beneath the Earth’s surface, when prospecting for oil. The aim, ESA explains, is to quantify the diffusion of petroleum compounds, which on Earth, seem to defy gravity, with heavier deposits ending up on top, and lighter ones, further down. A similar experiment has flown on a Russian Foton mission, but this one will be at a higher pressure. Marsha Freeman