Cosmic Penguin
Geek Penguin in GTO
(Editor's note: Articles for secret Chinese launches are much more easier to scrub than others, particularly given the circumstances for the past 2 weeks) :rofl
The first half of 2015 has been a rather interesting time for spaceflight - that is, except for one big player in the arena, which did nothing notable except for starting their big navigation satellite constellation construction with 1 satellite in March.
Where are the Chinese? :rofl:
Well they are still around after showing up with a secret satellite launch in late June, though this one raised more questions than answers.
Without any peeps beforehand, a Long March 4B rocket took off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern China on June 26 at 06:22 UTC. Its passenger entered a 475 km high polar orbit a dozen minutes later.
What is surprising is that it is not yet another Chinese spysat....or at least, they claimed it isn't! That satellite, instead of entering the category that everyone associates with military use, was named as the 8th satellite in the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS).
And this is where things got confusing. CHEOS is China's flagship civilian Earth observation satellite program that uses various types of satellites, not unlike ESA's Copernicus program. 7 missions were previously announced with GF-1 and GF-2 now in operations. But......unlike the other seven, GF-8 never existed in public materials!
It almost make those tracking the Chinese to wonder if this is a wolf with a sheep's skin. Well maybe, but the Chinese later do acknowledge that GF-8 is a sub-meter resolution optical satellite being the sister-craft of one of their spysat launched just before 2014 ended. It looks like that this might be one of the special cases where the secretive Chinese transferred new spysat tech to a semi-civilian role.
So far, the Chinese only launched twice in 2015, but this is about to change with about 1.5 dozen lined up for the rest of the year, including the maiden flights of the first member of their next generation launcher family, the Vega-class Long March 6, as well as their "Chinese Minotaur" Long March 11. Unfortunately, their new flagship rockets Long March 7 and 5 won't fly till 2016. Still there's much to wait for so don't miss out the future reports! :tiphat:
NASASpaceflight.com: Chinese Long March 4B conducts surprise Gaofen-8 launch
Spaceflight Now: China sends up remote sensing satellite
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLt9KiJD-GY"]中国航天 - 我国在太原卫星发射中心成功发射高分八号卫星 - YouTube[/ame]
The first half of 2015 has been a rather interesting time for spaceflight - that is, except for one big player in the arena, which did nothing notable except for starting their big navigation satellite constellation construction with 1 satellite in March.
Where are the Chinese? :rofl:
Well they are still around after showing up with a secret satellite launch in late June, though this one raised more questions than answers.
Without any peeps beforehand, a Long March 4B rocket took off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern China on June 26 at 06:22 UTC. Its passenger entered a 475 km high polar orbit a dozen minutes later.
What is surprising is that it is not yet another Chinese spysat....or at least, they claimed it isn't! That satellite, instead of entering the category that everyone associates with military use, was named as the 8th satellite in the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS).
And this is where things got confusing. CHEOS is China's flagship civilian Earth observation satellite program that uses various types of satellites, not unlike ESA's Copernicus program. 7 missions were previously announced with GF-1 and GF-2 now in operations. But......unlike the other seven, GF-8 never existed in public materials!
It almost make those tracking the Chinese to wonder if this is a wolf with a sheep's skin. Well maybe, but the Chinese later do acknowledge that GF-8 is a sub-meter resolution optical satellite being the sister-craft of one of their spysat launched just before 2014 ended. It looks like that this might be one of the special cases where the secretive Chinese transferred new spysat tech to a semi-civilian role.
So far, the Chinese only launched twice in 2015, but this is about to change with about 1.5 dozen lined up for the rest of the year, including the maiden flights of the first member of their next generation launcher family, the Vega-class Long March 6, as well as their "Chinese Minotaur" Long March 11. Unfortunately, their new flagship rockets Long March 7 and 5 won't fly till 2016. Still there's much to wait for so don't miss out the future reports! :tiphat:
NASASpaceflight.com: Chinese Long March 4B conducts surprise Gaofen-8 launch
Spaceflight Now: China sends up remote sensing satellite
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLt9KiJD-GY"]中国航天 - 我国在太原卫星发射中心成功发射高分八号卫星 - YouTube[/ame]
