Local residents pose for photos with China’s manned submersible Jiaolong in Jiangyin City, east China’s Jiangsu Province, Nov 25, 2014/XINHUA
This will be the sub’s maiden scientific expedition to the southwest Indian Ocean.
During the four-month mission, it will descend into the depths 20 times to focus on the research of polymetallic sulfides, biological diversity, hydrothermal microbes and genetic resources, said the mission’s chief commander and director of the National Deep Sea Centre, Yu Hongjun.
This will be the furthest and longest voyage for Jiaolong in terms of distance and time.
The ambitious ocean exploration program began in 2002.
Named after a mythical dragon, Jiaolong has reached a top depth of 7,062 meters in the Pacific’s Mariana Trench in June 2012.
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Xinhua News Agency, founded on November 7, 1931, is China’s national news agency as well as a global news and information network. Xinhua has set up a global news and information gathering network, with headquarters in Beijing, 33 domestic bureaus in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities plus the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as 140 bureaus in the rest of the world. Xinhua is yet to set up a bureau in Taiwan, where it has posted resident correspondents. Xinhua provides its worldwide subscribers with news and financial information products in the forms of text, photo, graphics, audio, video, and mobile phone text messages 24 hours a day in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese.
