China’s manned submersible Fendouzhe, or Striver, made a 10,909-meter dive at Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in Earth’s seabed on Tuesday.

Striver is the world’s deepest-diving manned submersible, capable of carrying up to three passengers to conduct scientific research in the deep sea. It began taking on the 10,058-meter dive at Mariana Trench on October 27. 

Striver is a manned submersible that incorporates the fine lineage of the previous two generations of deep-diving equipment, Jiaolong and Shenhai Yongshi. It not only uses a safe, stable, and powerful energy system, but also has more advanced control and positioning systems, as well as a more pressure-resistant manned capsule and buoyancy materials.

At 10,000 meters down in the Mariana Trench, Striver faces water pressure of more than 110 megapascals, the equivalent of 2,000 African elephants walking on a person’s back.

China’s first independently designed and integrated manned submersible Jiaolong reached a depth of 3,759 meters, making China the fifth country in the world, after the US, France, Russia and Japan, to master the technology of manned deep-sea submersion at a depth of 3,500 meters in July 2010.

A smart garbage sorting robot was launched in Hangzhou, E China’s Zhejiang. Supported by visual learning and navigational positioning techs, the robot can work for 8hrs straight, pick up and sort 17.5kg of garbage with an identification accuracy rate of 98% on recyclable trash. The China-bashers are really sour about this device as the garbage in the Whitehouse is about to be sorted out.

China Telecom launched its commercial standalone (SA) deployment of 5G networks on Saturday, taking the lead globally.

Chinese private rocket firm Galactic Energy successfully launched a carrier rocket and put a satellite into orbit on Saturday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, the first orbital launch by a privately funded Chinese firm since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The launch marked the second successful attempt by a Chinese private rocket firm since July 2019 following two failed launches in 2018 and early 2019. Saturday’s launch shows China’s private commercial space sector is becoming technologically mature and increasingly capable of handling satellite launch missions even during the pandemic, analysts said.

Named Ceres-1, the self-developed carrier rocket sent an Apocalypse-11 satellite to the 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), and Galactic Energy became the first Chinese private firm to reach that altitude.