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E-mail Xinhua, March 08, 2020

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BEIJING, March 8 (Xinhua) -- The following are the highlights of China's key technology news from the past week:

YUTU-2 TRAVELS ON MOON'S FAR SIDE

China's lunar rover Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, has driven 399.788 meters on the far side of the moon to conduct scientific exploration of the virgin territory.

Both the lander and the rover of the Chang'e-4 probe have ended their work for the 15th lunar day, and switched to dormant mode for the lunar night, according to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration.

The scientific tasks of the Chang'e-4 mission include conducting low-frequency radio astronomical observations, surveying the terrain and landforms, detecting the mineral composition and shallow lunar surface structure and measuring neutron radiation and neutral atoms.

Yutu-2 has worked much longer than its three-month design life, becoming the longest-working lunar rover on the moon.

PLANET NAMED AFTER CHINESE MYTHICAL FIGURE

The largest unnamed planet in the solar system has recently been named after the Chinese water god Gonggong by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

This is the first and only dwarf planet in the solar system that has a Chinese name, according to the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences Tuesday.

The planet, coded 2007OR10, was discovered in 2007 by three astronomers on the far edge of the solar system, outside Neptune's orbit. It is one of the reddest celestial bodies found in the Kuiper Belt in the solar system, and it rotates around the sun in an elliptical orbit.

NEW ASTEROID TO FLY BY EARTH

Chinese astronomers recently discovered a new asteroid and predicted that it would fly by Earth in early May.

The asteroid, designated 2020 DM4, was found by the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the end of February.

"2020 DM4 is approaching Earth. We estimate that the closest distance between the asteroid and Earth would be about 7.35 million km. It has some potential threat, but we need not worry about it," said Zhao Haibin, head of the Near-Earth Object Survey Telescope research team at PMO.

SELF-DRIVING VEHICLES

Self-driving vehicles have travelled more than 1.04 million km on Beijing's roads over a two-year period ending December, according to a recent industry report.

In 2019, 73 self-driving cars from 12 companies drove more than 886,600 km in Beijing, an increase of 577 percent from the distance in 2018, according to the Beijing self-driving vehicles road testing report compiled by the Beijing Innovation Center for Mobility Intelligent.

MAJOR CIVIL AVIATION PROJECTS

China's civil aviation authorities have made efforts to push forward the resumption of the construction of major infrastructure projects.

Efforts are underway to realize an annual fixed asset investment of 100 billion yuan (about 14.38 billion U.S. dollars) in 2020, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

As of March 3, the construction of 48 of the country's 81 airport projects had resumed.

CHINA SPALLATION NEUTRON SOURCE

The China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS), located in Dongguan city, south China's Guangdong Province, has reached its design beam power of 100 KW, a year and a half ahead of schedule, according to the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In September 2018, the CSNS ran with a power of 20 KW. Its operating beam power had reached 50 KW in January 2019 and 80 KW in October 2019.

With its beam power gradually increasing, the CSNS exceeded its user operation target in 2019 with a total of 4,576 hours.

AI EARTHQUAKE MONITORING SYSTEM

An artificial intelligence (AI) earthquake monitoring system has been put into a test run in southwest China's provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan.

The AI earthquake monitoring system, which can generate seismic source parameters within two seconds, showed extremely close accuracy with the manual computing method in 446 earthquake assessment results.

The system can process huge amount of seismic network big data and is expected to lower the misinformation percentage. Enditem