AIR held a workshop titled “International Cooperation to Help Build World-Class Research Institute” on May 29, aiming to promote its international cooperation from various aspects and to its boost S&T innovation with a global vision.The workshop was attended over 130 people including AIR staff and invited guests.

The Chang’e-4 lunar probe that successfully landed on the dark side of the moon on January 3, 2019, also carried with two payloads developed by AIR research teams, the lunar penetrating radar (LPR) and the very low frequency radio spectrometer (VLFRS). Both the payloads have successfully begun their operations onboard the lunar probe, making China the first country conducting radio observation on the far side of the moon and filling the scientific gap of radio astronomical observations at the frequencies between 100KHz~10MHz.

The Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) project in the town Lulangin of Tibet’s Linzhi City carried out water vapor observations on January 22, 2019, using a tethered balloon (Jimu-1), developed by the CAS Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR）.The research team was successful in making water vapor observation at a height of more than 6,200 meters above sea level. This is the first time that such a task has been achieved at this altitude.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences will release about 5 million gigabytes of data related to Earth sciences, biology and ecology from around globe, allowing scientists and officials worldwide to study and tackle issues in climate change, food security, disaster relief and environmental protection. The data can be accessed on the CASEarth Databank at data.casearth.cn, which was launched on Tuesday. Around 1.8 million gigabytes of content are remote-sensing data, 2.6 million gigabytes is on biology and ecology, and 0.4 million gigabytes is on the atmosphere and ocean, said Guo Huadong, chief scientist of CASEarth, the academy's Big Earth Data Science Engineering Project.

A workshop was held on January 7, 2019 in Beijing to mark the work of using Science and Technology (S&T) for Disaster Relief included in the CAS list of 40 hallmark S&T achievements as a result of China’s 40-year reform and opening up from 1978 to 2018.

Prof. ZHANG Bing and Prof. DING Chibiao, both from the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), received 2018 National Awards for Science and Technology during a ceremony held at the Great Hall of the People on January 8, 2019.