![](\"https:\/\/english.spacechina.com\/n17212\/c4512151\/part\/4512281.jpg\")
<\/p>\nChina on Saturday sent a new satellite into space from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the country’s southwestern Sichuan Province.<\/p>\n
The satellite, Fengyun-4 03, was launched by a Long March-3B rocket at 12:07 a.m. (Beijing Time) and has entered its planned orbit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
With this successful launch, China’s Fengyun meteorological satellite family — now consisting of more than 20 satellites — has gained a new member that is considered the most capable in terms of comprehensive observation capabilities.<\/p>\n
According to the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), the Fengyun-4 03 satellite is equipped with four Earth-observation instruments and two solar-observation instruments. It features a range of advanced capabilities, representing a substantial upgrade in observational performance, detection parameters and data transmission efficiency.<\/p>\n
Among its instruments, the advanced geostationary radiation imager can now complete a full-disk scan of Earth in five minutes — three times faster than the previous 15-minute cycle — and is sensitive enough to detect atmospheric temperature variations as small as one-fiftieth of a degree Celsius from thousands of kilometers away.<\/p>\n
Another key payload, the geostationary interferometric infrared sounder, has enhanced its spatial resolution from 12 kilometers to 8 kilometers and can map temperature and humidity across China within one hour.<\/p>\n
Its lightning imager captures 500 frames per second and can identify lightning events within a 30-gigabit-per-second data stream — a processing feat comparable to screening 30 high-definition movies in one second to locate individual frames containing lightning signals.<\/p>\n
According to the SAST, the Fengyun-4 series has progressively expanded China’s meteorological observation capacities.<\/p>\n
China launched the Fengyun-4 01 satellite in December 2016, followed by the Fengyun-4 02 in June 2021. With the new Fengyun-4 03 satellite — which enables inter-satellite coordination, high-speed data transmission, and broadcast functions — the three satellites will now form an integrated and coordinated observation network.<\/p>\n
SAST said that this enhanced network will significantly improve China’s capabilities in weather forecasting, meteorological disaster prevention, space-weather monitoring, and ecological-environment observation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China on Saturday sent a new satellite into space from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the country’s southwestern Sichuan Province. The satellite, Fengyun-4 03, was launched by a Long March-3B rocket at 12:07 a.m. (Beijing Time) and has entered its planned orbit. With this successful launch, China’s Fengyun meteorological satellite family — now consisting […]<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-3004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3004"}],"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=3004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}