Nature publishes a report on Chinese gravitational wave research

GSFC/D.Berry/NASA
Gravitational waves from the binary star system HM Cancri (artist’s impression) would be the target of TianQin,
one of China’s proposed space-based detectors.
 

"A second Chinese proposal, led by Luo Jun, a physicist at the Sun Yat-sen University campus in Zhuhai, would lower the bar in terms of cost and resources. Called TianQin, a name that refers to the metaphor of nature playing a stringed instrument (a zither) in space, the project has three satellites that orbit Earth at a distance of about 150,000 kilometres from each other. It would cost 2 billion yuan, says Luo.”

"TianQin ... rather than acting as an observatory for the waves emitted by myriad objects including black holes and neutron stars, it would mainly target a particular pair of orbiting white dwarf stars, called HM Cancri. TianQin’s simplicity makes it cheaper and more certain of success, Luo says. The spacecraft could launch in 15–20 years, he adds, .... Luo thinks that a simpler project is more realistic now, but says that TianQin could lay the groundwork for ... project in the future.”