{"id":12371,"date":"2020-07-06T17:45:38","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T09:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/chinese-launches-loft-satellites-to-study-space-environment-and-observe-earth\/"},"modified":"2020-07-06T17:45:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T09:45:38","slug":"chinese-launches-loft-satellites-to-study-space-environment-and-observe-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/chinese-launches-loft-satellites-to-study-space-environment-and-observe-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese launches loft satellites to study space environment and observe Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
A Long March 4B rocket takes off from the Taiyuan space center Friday. Credit: Xinhua<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

China launched a Long March 2D rocket Saturday with a satellite Chinese officials claimed will study the space environment and conduct technology demonstrations, less than two days after a Long March 4B rocket took off from a different launch site with an Earth-imaging payload.<\/p>\n

The missions marked China\u2019s 16th and 17th orbital-class launches this year. Two of the launches earlier this year failed to reach orbit with their payloads.<\/p>\n

The Long March 4B launch occurred at 0310 GMT July 3 (11:10 p.m. EDT July 2) from the Taiyuan space center, located in Shanxi province in northern China. The country\u2019s state-owned Xinhua news agency described the mission\u2019s primary payload as a  \u201chigh-resolution multi-mode imaging satellite.\u201d<\/p>\n

The satellite is believed to be part of China\u2019s civilian-focused Gaofen series of Earth-imaging satellites. A secondary payload deployed by the Long March 4B rocket was a CubeSat developed by Chinese students.<\/p>\n

The three-stage, liquid-fueled Long March 4B launcher delivered the two satellites to a polar, sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude around 400 miles (640 kilometers) above Earth.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A Long March 2D rocket takes off Saturday from the Jiuquan space base in northwestern China. Credit: Xinhua<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A two-stage Long March 2D rocket took off from the Jiuquan space base Sunday \u2014 Chinese time \u2014 with China\u2019s second Shiyan 6-series tech demo and research satellite, Xinhua said.<\/p>\n

The Long March 2D blasted off at 2344 GMT (7:44 p.m. EDT) Saturday \u2014 or at 7:44 a.m. Beijing time Sunday \u2014 with some 650,000 pounds of thrust from its hydrazine-burning main engines. Less than 15 minutes later, the rocket delivered the Shiyan 6 spacecraft to an orbit at an altitude of around 435 miles (700 kilometers).<\/p>\n

Xinhua said the second Shiyan 6 satellite has a mission to study the environment and conduct \u201crelated technology experiments.\u201d<\/p>\n

China launched the first Shiyan 6 satellite in November 2018. The Shiyan family of Chinese satellites are designed for technology demonstrations. Shiyan means \u201cexperiment\u201d in Chinese.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Long March 4B rocket takes off from the Taiyuan space center Friday. Credit: Xinhua China launched a Long March 2D rocket Saturday with a satellite Chinese officials claimed will study the space environment and conduct technology demonstrations, less than two days after a Long March 4B rocket took off from a different launch site […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[135,1608,159,1793,1578,25,205,2184],"class_list":["post-12371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-china","tag-cubesats","tag-earth-observation","tag-gaofen","tag-jiuquan","tag-launch","tag-long-march","tag-long-march-2d"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12371"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}