Chinese scientists have cultivated a high-yield salt-resistant rice variety that boasts an output of six tonnes per hectare. In an experimental program, two professors from Hainan University and additional researchers from the Hunan Provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences planted 18 salt-resistant varieties on 0.2 hectares of saline-alkali land along the sea coast in the city of Yancheng in eastern Jiangsu province this year.
China will launch upgraded satellites and expand its regional Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) to global coverage by 2020, a spokesman for the system said on Friday. "BDS's general performance is expected to be improved by one to two times the current level and its positioning accuracy could be upgraded to the meter or even sub-meter level" by 2020, BDS spokesman Ran Chengqi said at a press conference.
China is expanding its presence at the South Pole, with construction workers leaving its Zhongshan Station on Wednesday to build the Taishan summer field camp, the country's fourth Antarctic base. Site inspections for another research station will also be carried out at Antarctica's Victoria Land during a 155-day expedition launched on Nov 7.
China expects to gain a scientific understanding of the moon and develop its space technologies through its lunar program, a spokesman said in Beijing on Monday. China has carried out its lunar exploration program as current financial and technical conditions have allowed, said Wu Zhijian, spokesman with the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, during a press conference.
China needs to build a deep space monitoring station abroad because the existing network is not capable of tracking deep space detectors round the clock, a leading scientist said on Monday. Despite having two monitoring stations in the country, there are still eight to ten hours a day during which China cannot track its deep space detectors, said Zhou Jianliang, chief engineer of the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, at a press conference.
China plans to launch lunar probe Chang'e-5 in 2017, according to the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. "The development of Chang'e-5 is proceeding smoothly," said the administration's spokesman Wu Zhijian at a press conference on Monday. The just-concluded Chang'e-3 mission marked completion of the second phase of the country's lunar program, which includes orbiting, landing and returning to Earth.
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