20 July 2017
Grinding wheat from scratch, eating veggies grown in your own waste, and fried worms for dinner: Life in space is no picnic. At Beihang University, formerly known as Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, four students on 9 July entered a capsule meant to simulate space living and will remain in it for more than six months, sustaining themselves on what they grow inside.
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19 July 2017
China's first X-ray astronomical satellite, launched in mid June, is expected to start regular observation in November and its data will be open to scientists all over the world, say the main designers of the satellite's data system. The 2.5-tonne Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), dubbed Insight, transmitted to a ground station its first data on its second day in orbit. The data proved to be of good quality, and the telescope detected a gamma-ray burst 10 days after its launch. "We will finish calibrating all instruments within the first five months in orbit before Insight starts regular observation," said Song Liming, deputy chief designer of the HXMT science ground segment and a scientist with the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Song and his team solicited observation proposals from scientists around the country last year, and drew up a one-year observation plan after evaluating 90 proposals from six CAS institutes and 10 universities.
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19 July 2017
Robert Bigelow, famous for his inflatable space habitat and his real estates around Los Angeles is trying to push for Moon settlement. In the 1960s Wernher von Braun took some support by Walt Disney to get the Moon message accross. Today, Bigelow is using cartoons to urge the U.S. lawmakers to take up the Chinese challenge of Moon exploration - quite a creative way of addressing the audience at a NASA conference.
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18 July 2017
A delegation from China's tech giant Tencent as well as tech-support experts will be in Windhoek, Namibia to brief the country on its Earth exploration program, QQ Project X, on 21 July. Namibia was selected as one of two countries for the 2017 edition of the QQ Project X by Tencent. Earth Explorers selected to take part in the project will undertake exploration missions and share their experience on the Internet.
According to Namibia's Ministry of Information and Technology on Tuesday, the project will essentially involve 15 Chinese youth volunteers travelling to Namibia and filming the sky and broadcasting.
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