26 January 2021
The CZ-6A, China's first carrier rocket powered by a solid and liquid engine, will make its first flight in 2021, its developer, the 8th Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), said. The CZ-6A is a new generation medium-launch vehicle, and can be powered by different numbers of liquid and solid engines to achieve different carrying capacity levels, and provide more cost-effective launch service. Also, the rocket has a higher degree of automation and intelligent applications can monitor and diagnose potential problems.
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25 January 2021
Blaine Curcio of Orbital Gateway Consulting and Jean Deville of The China Aerospace Blog are reporting for SpaceWatch.Global on China's main aerospace events of the last week. They are giving details about CASIC's new satellite factory in Wuhan, the announcement of the Tianxun IoT constellation, the new funding round for Jiuzhou Yunjian and the name competition for the Mars rover which is on its way to the Red Planet.
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25 January 2021
In an op-ed piece for SpaceNews, Dean Cheng of the Washington-based The Heritage Foundation, analyses what drives China's space programme. His emphasis is on the two major aspects: substance in technology and hardware development which supports - and at the same time is interlaced with - symbolism. Taking it from there, he shows what are the implications for U.S. efforts in space and which lessons the U.S. could learn from the Chinese approach.
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22 January 2021
Anne-Marie Slaughter and Emily Lawrence argue in an commentary for Project Syndicate that space cooperation between the U.S. and China should be a aim of the new U.S. government. By focussing on common interests and norms for commercial activities in space, "both countries, along with the rest of the world, would benefit from a set of clear rules governing the exploration and commercialization of space." This would help that "unregulated commercial activity could cause a host of problems, from orbital pollution that jeopardizes spacecraft to biological contamination of scientifically valuable sites."
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25 January 2021
TASS news agency reported that head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said via his Telegram channel that Roscosmos is continuing talks with China and other international partners on the options for cooperation in a joint Moon base: "We are holding talks with all international partners, first and foremost China, on establishing a Moon research base," Rogozin wrote.
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23 January 2021
Chang'e 4 has switched to dormant mode after concluding the operations for the 26th lunar day on the Moon's far side. The lander switched to stand-by on 20 January at 21:10 BJT and the Yutu 2 rover at 14:06 BJT the same day. The pair has been working for 749 Earth days, with the rover traveling a total distance of 628.47 meters.
A new publication in Geophysical Research Letters presents the results of VNIS data: Using Yutu's Visible-Near Infrared Spectrometer (VNIS) local measurements of "thermal emission ... at short wavelengths and temperature variations at centimeter scales were retrieved during the 1st, 2nd, and 10th day of rover operations on the lunar surface. These in situ observations are an important complement to the existing large‐scale measurements taken from orbit and reveal that the millimeter scale roughness plays an important role when deriving temperatures and physical properties of the lunar surface regolith."
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link to the publication in Geophysical Research Letters