With the increasing scale of space infrastructure such as large space telescopes, antenna arrays, and solar power stations, the payload fairing size of launch vehicles has become a critical bottleneck constraining their development. On-orbit autonomous assembly via deployable modules has emerged as an important technical approach to overcome this limitation. Deployable modules typically exhibit high packaging ratios; however, the geometric deviations caused by residual strain, assembly tolerances, and dynamic coupling effects after deployment can significantly affect docking accuracy and structural stability, and may even lead to assembly failure. Nevertheless, existing studies have mostly focused on post-deployment final configuration accuracy optimization, with insufficient attention paid to the cooperative strategies between real-time deformation control and motion control during the assembly process. Moreover, a dynamic modeling method capable of accurately describing the coupling between variable-length flexible components and rigid bodies is still lacking. Therefore, how to achieve active configuration correction and coordinated position–attitude control of deployable modules on orbit has become a key challenge in the autonomous assembly of large space structures.

With the continuous advancement of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology, L-band SAR has come to play an increasingly important role in Earth observation; however, its imaging, interferometric, and polarimetric performance are susceptible to ionospheric disturbances. In equatorial nighttime data, amplitude streak artifacts induced by equatorial plasma bubbles frequently occur and have traditionally been regarded as interference factors in SAR imaging. Nevertheless, these artifacts essentially carry critical information on ionospheric irregularities and can be exploited to retrieve physical parameters such as scintillation intensity and turbulence spectral indices. Existing methods either rely on comparisons between disturbed and undisturbed images or are limited to preliminary one-dimensional parameter estimation along the track, making it difficult to achieve two-dimensional fine-scale retrieval of scintillation structures, and lacking systematic validation of their spatial correlation with equatorial ionospheric anomalies. Therefore, how to extract the two-dimensional spatial distribution of ionospheric scintillation parameters from amplitude streak artifacts and reveal their intrinsic relationship with regions of enhanced electron density has become an important scientific question in the field of ionospheric remote sensing.

Researchers from Sun Yat-sen University and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) recently observed a species of armored searobin, Scalicus engyceros, walking sideways and backward on the sea floor in the South China Sea. This is the first time a species of fish has been observed walking backward.