Construction begins on Guangzhou rocket base
09 March 2021
Construction of a new rocket production base began on 08 March in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, Guangdong province. Facilities in Nansha will be capable of design, manufacturing, assembly and testing of rockets. Covering about 40 hectares, the rocket production facility, situated at the mouth of the Pearl River, is expected to be able to produce more than 30 carrier rockets annually after operations get underway in early 2022.
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Scientists detect new fast radio bursts with FAST
08 March 2021
A research team led by the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences discovered 3 new FRBs with a high-dispersion measurement from the mass of data of China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST).
The discovery was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters journal last week. The newly discovered FRBs, together with the first FRB captured by FAST in 2020, suggest there could be as many as 120,000 detectable FRBs arriving on Earth every day, according to the study. Based on the data from FAST, the scientists are expecting more discoveries while catching up with data processing.
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Space programme veteran sees no limits to space exploration
08 March 2021
On the occasion of the International Women's Day, a portrait of Zhang Yuhua, the Deputy Chief Commander of the Chang’e 5 and Tianwan 1 space missions, was published by the online portal shine.cn. Zhang Yuhua looks back at a 3 decades long career at SAST. After graduation in 1990, she was assigned to work at SAST, just when China’s manned, lunar and Mars space missions were beginning. “I was lucky to get in on the ground floor of China’s aerospace industry,” she said. Zhang encountered her biggest setback in 2014, when the six-wheeled Yutu 1 rover, designed by her team, malfunctioned on its second lunar day. She suffered insomnia for three days and cried alone in her room, she said.
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China Space Station - what to expect?
01 March 2021
Rui C. Barbosa wrote for NASASpaceflight.com a comprehensive overview article about what is known regarding the Chinese Space Station. He lists the expected launches, the station configuration and functions of the respective station modules and how the initial utilisation could look like.
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