BEIJING, Jan. 10 (Xinhua) -- The following is a summary of published science and technology news of China.

LUNAR PROBE

China's Chang'e-6 lunar probe is scheduled for launch in the first half of this year, the China National Space Administration said.

Components for the Chang'e-6 lunar probe have been transported to the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in the southern province of Hainan, and pre-launch tests will be carried out as scheduled, the agency said.

TELESCOPE

Chinese scientists are working for an ambitious goal: building a powerful telescope at 3,500 meters underwater to detect neutrinos, which can help uncover long-standing mysteries such as the origin of cosmic rays.

The underwater telescope, dubbed the Tropical Deep-sea Neutrino Telescope (TRIDENT), innovatively observes the cosmos by "looking down" instead of "looking up" at the sky, said Xu Donglian, the telescope's chief scientist from the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute under the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

He explained that the TRIDENT utilizes the entire Earth as a shield when capturing high-energy neutrinos penetrating from the other side of the globe and achieves detections without a dead angle through Earth rotation.

ASTRONOMICAL SATELLITE

China's newly launched X-ray astronomical satellite Einstein Probe (EP) has adopted a cutting-edge technology inspired by the functioning of lobster's eyes, marking a breakthrough for China in the field of space science.

Shaped like a double-pistiled lotus flower with 12 petals blooming in space, the EP is designed to detect outbursts in the universe at X-ray wavelengths. Each "petal" is a special X-ray telescope. On each "petal" there are 36 microporous imagers, each containing nearly one million square holes thinner than a single strand of hair. Enditem

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