13 June 2020
China has revealed the interior layout of the return capsule of its experimental new-generation manned spaceship for the first time. Inside the capsule, the right side of it was for supplies. This time, the capsule carried nearly 1,000 pieces of supplies to verify the spaceship's cargo capacity, making it a trip with the heaviest goods and greatest variety of items in China's space trip history. And on its left side was a living area for astronauts, with a folding table and a toilet. The interior surfaces and fixtures were also in good condition, which shows the split design inside the capsule works.
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13 June 2020
The Chinese Beidou navigation network will be complete this month when its final satellite goes into orbit, giving China greater independence from U.S.-owned GPS and heating up competition in a sector long dominated by the United States. With estimated investment of $10 billion, Beidou keeps the communications network of the Chinese military secure, avoiding the risk of disruption to GPS in the extreme event of conflict. Weapons targeting and guidance also improves. When complete, Beidou's location services are accurate down to 10 cm in the Asia-Pacific, compared with GPS's 30-cm range.
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12 June 2020
With the close collaboration between National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and European Space Agency (ESA), ESA's world-leading interactive celestial atlas, ESASky, has now been translated into Chinese. ESASky is a discovery portal that provides full access to the entire sky. It is a web-based application allowing users to zoom in on any celestial object they may be interested in. Once there, they can look at data collected from more than 50 space missions and ground-based observatories across all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. The application is under the responsibility of the ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC), based at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC), Madrid, Spain.
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12 June 2020
The satellites, Xingyun-2 01 and 02 for China's space-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) project have completed phase-1 tests in orbit. Engineers at the Xingyun Ground Gateway, located in Wuhan National Aerospace Industry Base, tested the satellite platforms, payloads, and key technologies such as inter-satellite links. The results were in line with expectations, CASIC said. Additional in-orbit tests will be continued for the completion of the Xingyun project, China's first self-developed, space-based IoT constellation. The project is anticipated to solve problems detected in the IoT businesses' communication blind-zone, as a result of deficient coverage of cellular wireless communication networks.
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