XICHANG, Sichuan, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) — China successfully launched another satellite into space for its indigenous global navigation and positioning network at 11:33 p.m. Beijing Time Thursday, the launch center said.<\/p>\n
The satellite, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwestern province of Sichuan, was boosted by a Long March-3C carrier rocket.<\/p>\n
It was the 16th satellite for the Beidou system, or Compass system.<\/p>\n
The network is planned to officially provide services for most parts of the Asia-Pacific region in early 2013 and begin offering global services by 2020.<\/p>\n
Since it started to provide services on a trial basis on Dec. 27, 2011, the Beidou system has been stable, said a spokesperson of the China Satellite Navigation Office.<\/p>\n
The system has been gradually used in extended sectors including transportation, weather forecasting, marine fisheries, forestry, telecommunications, hydrological monitoring and mapping, according to the spokesperson.<\/p>\n
The newly-launched satellite will play an important role in improving the system’s service, the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
China started to build up its own satellite navigation system to break its dependence on the U.S. Global Positioning System in 2000.<\/p>\n
Between October 2000 and May 2003, the country set up a regional satellite navigation system after launching three Beidou geostationary satellites.<\/p>\n
Beidou-1 can not meet growing demand, so China decided to set up a more functional Beidou-2 regional and global navigation system, Qi Faren, former chief designer for Shenzhou spaceships, said in an interview in 2011.<\/p>\n
The Beidou-2 system will eventually consist of 35 satellites.<\/p>\n
Five Beidou satellites were sent into space early this year. The 11th satellite was boosted by a Long March-3C carrier rocket on Feb. 25, the 12th and 13th were sent by a Long March-3B carrier on April 30, while the 14th and 15th satellites were launched on Sept. 19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
XICHANG, Sichuan, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) — China successfully launched another satellite into space for its indigenous global navigation and positioning network at 11:33 p.m. Beijing Time Thursday, the launch center said. The satellite, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwestern province of Sichuan, was boosted by a Long March-3C carrier rocket. It […]<\/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-4287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4287"}],"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=4287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}