23 January 2020
China announced that it will launch its first Mars mission probe in July this year, China Youth Daily reported on 23 January, adding that this is the first time the country disclosed the launch month of its Mars exploration programme. The Mars probe will be sent by the Long March-5 Y4 carrier rocket, said the newspaper, citing sources from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).
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23 January 2020
China will press on with work on a permanent space station after the core module and carrier rocket for the vehicle arrived at the launch site for rehearsals and preparation, the developer said on 21 January. The Tianhe module was recently transported to the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on the southern Chinese island of Hainan for three months of trials with a Long March-5B rocket, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) said on its WeChat social media account.
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27 January 2020
Jeff Foust of TheSpaceReview takes a look at the current status of commercial space activities in China. He thinks that "the closest competitor to the United States in entrepreneurial space might be China. Dozens of startups have emerged in just the last few years, pursuing everything from launch vehicles to constellations of communications or remote sensing satellites, much like their American counterparts. The rise of China’s overall economy to one of the largest in the world has prompted questions about whether these Chinese space startups could pose serious competition to American companies."
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22 January 2020
Jiang Peng is the chief engineer of China's Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), known as the China sky eye, which started formal operation on January 11 in Southwest China's Guizhou Province. Jiang completed his doctoral study in 2009. He was faced with choices of continuing his studies or finding something challenging and intriguing to do, Jiang said in a forum held by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Then he saw a job recruitment advertisement for FAST - a project to design and build a transformable cable net structure 500 meters in diameter with millimeter scale accuracy. Jiang firstly thought the advertisement might be a fraud since it seemed impossible to design such a structure at that time. But an attached official document released by the National Reform and Development Commission told him it is a real and significant science and technology project.
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