ABOARD KEXUE VESSEL, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese research vessel "Kexue" left the port of Xiamen in east China's Fujian Province Sunday to continue its scientific expedition in the South China Sea.

During the second stage of its mission, scientists will test the performance of the country's self-developed underwater robot which will conduct collaborative operations with an unmanned submersible, said Sun Song, a scientist with the program.

Meanwhile, the unmanned submersible will carry the domestically-developed raman spectrometer to collect marine physical and chemical parameters and take camera images of marine benthos' activities, according to Sun.

Kexue left Qingdao in east China's Shandong Province on July 10 for a maritime scientific expedition and stopped in Xiamen to resupply Friday after completing the first part of the mission.

In the first stage, a total of 12 Chinese-developed underwater gliders carried out scientific observations in the South China Sea and sent back real-time data. It was the largest group of gliders to perform simultaneous observations in the region. Enditem

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