Tag: China

Two NASA employees indicted for allowing Chinese scientist access

8:37 am

Two NASA supervisors from the Langley Research Center in Virginia have been indicted for allowing a Chinese scientist unrestricted access to the facilities there for two years, including allowing the scientist to return to China with a NASA-issued laptop.

What I find amazing about this indictment is that a U.S. attorney in the Obama Justice Department has issued it. The Obama administration and NASA administrator Charles Bolden want unrestricted cooperation with China, and have even done some things that could also violate the same laws against providing U.S. technology to China. Under these conditions, I would have thought the attorney would have been ordered to drop the case, just as the Obama administration has done with numerous other examples where someone in that administration did something illegal and got away with it.

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China launches first commercial Earth-observation satellite

9:21 am

The competition heats up: China today successfully launched its first Earth-observation satellite for providing commercial images to the public.

A Long March 2C rocket launched the Jilin 1 satellite constellation, which consists of a primary high definition optical satellite, as well as two Lingqiao video satellites and a fourth, LQSat, to test space technology. Xuan Ming, from the Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd, earlier told Xinhua the satellites will focus on providing images to commercial clients, while helping with harvest assessment, geological disaster prevention and resource surveys. Jilin-1 is reported to be capable of very high definition images, boasting a resolution of 0.72m with a pan-chromatic camera and a 4m resolution multi-spectral camera.

The article also provides a short but nice summary of China’s space plans for 2016, including its first manned mission since 2013.

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Long March 6 launch a success

9:12 pm

The competition heats up: The first launch of China’s smallsat rocket Long March 6 was a success on Saturday, putting 20 satellites into orbit.

This rocket is part of a new family of Chinese rockets, modularly designed so that can be reconfigured depending on payload or mission. The big launch however will be next year, when they attempt the first test flight of the largest member of this family.

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China to launch new rocket today

7:54 am

The competition heats up: With the expected first launch of China’s new Long March 6 rocket today, this report nicely outlines the status of the country’s rocket program.

Like Russia’s Angara and SpaceX’s Falcon, the new generation of Long March rockets are modular and use the same rocket engine. This has reduced cost and allows for faster assembly. The launch today is the maiden flight of the smaller member of this family. The key launch will be that of the larger Long March 5, scheduled for next year. Capable of putting 25 tons in orbit (five more than Proton), this is the rocket they plan to use to launch the modules for their full-sized space station.

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Chinese scientists do genetic experiments with human embryos

11:22 pm

What could possibly go wrong? A Chinese team of scientists have been experimenting with genetically manipulating the human embryo to see if they can prevent a genetic blood disorder.

The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for Ξ²-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications. “I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes.”

They not only found the technique unreliable in curing the genetic disease, it also produced many more unpredicted mutations.

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China’s first reusable shuttle?

9:32 am

On Monday China launched the first of a new generation of GPS satellites using a secretive new upper stage they call Yuanzheng-1 (“Expedition-1” in English).

The first article describes Yuanzheng-1 as follows:

The Yuanzheng-1 (β€œExpedition-1β€³) uses a small thrust 6.5 kN engine burning UDMH/N2O4 with specific impulse at 3092 m/s. The upper stage should be able to conduct two burns and has a 6.5 hour lifetime. It will be adapted for use on the CZ-3A/B/C series mainly for direct MEO/GEO insertion missions (mostly for the navigation satellites of the Beidou GNSS).

This description make it appear that Yuanzheng-1 is nothing more than a typical upper stage, capable of bringing its cargo to the appropriate orbit.

The second article, however, has a concept picture of Yuanzheng-1, a shuttle-like craft that looks to me to strongly resemble the X-37B. Nothing in the second article however contradicts the first, which leaves us with a mystery. Is this upper stage capable of returning to Earth after it deploys its cargo? The fact that the Chinese were unusually secretive about the launch itself suggests that there was definitely something unusual about the rocket itself.

If the Chinese have made their upper stage reusable they have taken a big step to reducing costs in a way that will allow them to compete with SpaceX, should that company succeed in returning its first stage so that it can be reused.

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Yutu reveals a complex lunar geology

6:56 pm

The uncertainty of science: The Chinese lunar rover Yutu has uncovered a much more complicated geology history than previously predicted at its landing site on the moon.

Those data paint a detailed portrait of the Chang’e 3 landing site, which sits just 165 feet (50 m) away from a 1,475-foot-wide (450 m) crater known as C1. C1 was gouged out by a cosmic impact that occurred sometime between 80 million and 27 million years ago, the study authors said.

Yutu studied the ground it rolled over, characterized the craters it cruised past and investigated an oddly coarse-textured rock dubbed Loong, which measures about 13 feet long by 5 feet high (4 by 1.5 m). Overall, the rover’s observations suggest that the composition of its landing site is quite different from that of the places visited by NASA’s Apollo missions and the Soviet Union’s Luna program.

The rover found 9 distinct layers, suggesting numerous and different past events that layered the surface.

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