Cosmic Penguin
Geek Penguin in GTO
It's been quite a longer wait than originally planned, but China's most advanced Earth observation satellite and a microsat from Poland has finally reached space! On August 19 at 03:15 UTC, a Long March 4B rocket lifted off from pad 9 at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern China. About 15 minutes later, the satellites were put into 600 km polar orbits around the Earth.
Being the 2nd satellite of the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), Gaofen 2 is China's first sub-meter resolution class satellite (well, at least on their "bright" side of their world :rofl
. With a maximum resolution of up to 0.8 meters in panchromatic photos and 3.2 meters in multi-spectral mode, GF-2 is China's answer to their own version of similar Earth observation satellites around the world like SPOT, Pleiades-1 and WorldView-1. While not as amazingly sharp as the recently launched WorldView-3, GF-2 and the smaller GF-1 (launched in April last year) will become the workhorses of China's Earth observation eyes from above, with government, academic and commercial customers eager to put its abilities in urban/rural planning, disaster relief and many other applications into service.
Also on board is BRITE-PL2, the 2nd of 2 micro-satellites operated by the Academy of Sciences of Poland (the 1st launched in November last year). Slated to join at least 5 other similar satellites built by the Canadians, it carries instruments to detect signs of variability in the brightness of the brightest stars of the sky, having 10 times the precision than ground-based observations.
The two had a much longer stay on the ground than planned. GF-2 was already being processed at the launch site last year for a ride on the last planned Chinese launch of the year on December 29 when disaster struck the satellite riding on the same type of rocket in front of the queue just 20 days before their launch. After months of investigations and remedy to foreign objects in the pipelines of the third stage engines, as well as other problems with the satellite itself, the Long March 4B performed flawlessly on this return to flight!
NASASpaceflight.com: Chinese Long March 4B launches Gaofen-2 and BRITE-PL-2
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MSRO-ZftIY"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MSRO-ZftIY[/ame]
Being the 2nd satellite of the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), Gaofen 2 is China's first sub-meter resolution class satellite (well, at least on their "bright" side of their world :rofl
. With a maximum resolution of up to 0.8 meters in panchromatic photos and 3.2 meters in multi-spectral mode, GF-2 is China's answer to their own version of similar Earth observation satellites around the world like SPOT, Pleiades-1 and WorldView-1. While not as amazingly sharp as the recently launched WorldView-3, GF-2 and the smaller GF-1 (launched in April last year) will become the workhorses of China's Earth observation eyes from above, with government, academic and commercial customers eager to put its abilities in urban/rural planning, disaster relief and many other applications into service.Also on board is BRITE-PL2, the 2nd of 2 micro-satellites operated by the Academy of Sciences of Poland (the 1st launched in November last year). Slated to join at least 5 other similar satellites built by the Canadians, it carries instruments to detect signs of variability in the brightness of the brightest stars of the sky, having 10 times the precision than ground-based observations.
The two had a much longer stay on the ground than planned. GF-2 was already being processed at the launch site last year for a ride on the last planned Chinese launch of the year on December 29 when disaster struck the satellite riding on the same type of rocket in front of the queue just 20 days before their launch. After months of investigations and remedy to foreign objects in the pipelines of the third stage engines, as well as other problems with the satellite itself, the Long March 4B performed flawlessly on this return to flight!
NASASpaceflight.com: Chinese Long March 4B launches Gaofen-2 and BRITE-PL-2
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MSRO-ZftIY"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MSRO-ZftIY[/ame]
