19 January 2020
Researchers from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) have developed the country's first Hall-effect thruster (HET) with an input power of 20 kilowatts that can produce a thrust of one newton, marking a leap for China's HETs from millinewton level to newton level. During a test, the thruster showed stable operation, with a specific impulse of 3068 seconds and working efficiency above 70 percent. HETs could have wide applications in the attitude control of satellites and the use as a main propulsion engine for medium-size robotic space vehicles.
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18 January 2020
On 17 January, China's space-tracking ship Yuanwang 6 completed its first overhaul after trail voyages, preparing for future missions. Docking at a port on east China coast, the vessel represents the third generation of the country's Yuanwang space-tracking ships. The nine-month overhaul started in April 2019 at Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai, the vessel's first major maintenance after it was commissioned in 2008. It has improved the ship's power system and enhanced the operability of onboard equipment.
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17 January 2020
Over the past few months, China's aerospace industry has witnessed many landmark events. Apart from celebrating these scientific achievements and milestones, the public has also developed a growing interest in the missions' unique names, of which many are derived from China's myths and legends. Here are some examples. China's spacecraft are called Shenzhou. This literally means "heavenly ship" in Chinese, and is also a homonym for the Chinese words "divine land," which is a term used in literary works to refer to the country.
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10 January 2020
Researchers from the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures of the Nanjing University developed drones which in the future could be usable in a mobile quantum network for the purpose of on-demand and real-time coverage at different time and space scales, from local-area network to wide-area network with a reach of hundreds of kilometers or more. During a first test, the experts realize a mobile entanglement distribution to connect two ground locations in up to 200 m distance. In the future, such mobile network can interconnect with the satellites and fiber networks for further extension, which will finally form a practical, multifunctional global quantum network.
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Link to paper in National Science Review
18 January 2020
In May 2018, China announced the formal opening of its future space station to international collaboration and warmly invited the world to actively take advantage of this space infrastructure and conduct experiments. International cooperation in this field is mutually beneficial and needs to be ongoing.
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16 January 2020
China's most powerful low-orbiting communication satellite, also the biggest spacecraft ever built by a private Chinese company, was launched on 16 January at 11:02 h (Beijing Time) by a Kuaizhou-1A (KZ-1A) carrier rocket. The GalaxySpace 1, designed and built by the Beijing-based startup GalaxySpace, has also been widely considered the country's first 5G-capable satellite that features a very strong capability in data transmission.
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