BEIJING, March 17 (Xinhua) -- The following is a summary of published science and technology news of China.

LUNAR STATION

Scientists have proposed several objectives for a future international lunar research station, including moon-based Earth observation and lunar resource utilization, the China Science Daily reported on Friday.

China plans to establish a basic model for a lunar research station based on two planned exploration missions by 2028, and subsequently expand it into an international one.

SELF-DRIVING

A research team from Tsinghua University has made a breakthrough in autonomous driving, developing a technology that allows vehicles to self-learn while driving to deal with unfamiliar situations, an innovation that could resolve self-driving safety concerns.

The technology enables continuous performance improvements in cars using the data collected during autonomous driving, unlike the conventional method of training cars as much as possible in various driving scenarios in advance, according to the study findings published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Conventional self-driving technology is based on an algorithm with more data collected through lengthy trainings in possible driving scenarios, whereby the car has a preset response plan in case of emergency. Therefore, the car might not know how to react in unfamiliar situations in which it has not trained, posing a threat to driving safety.

NEUTRON STAR

A group of Chinese astronomers identified a peculiar neutron star candidate in a binary system, 385 light years away from the Earth, which could be the nearest and lightest neutron star ever known if confirmed.

The researchers from Peking University and the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported the discovery based on observations of China's Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) and the Nanshan 1-meter Wide-field Telescope (NOWT) in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The candidate, a dark companion to an old-age star, with only approximately 0.98 times the solar mass, is presumed to resemble an X-ray-dim isolated neutron star (XDINS), but in binary, according to the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.