China sends radar mapping and GNSS augmentation sats into orbit with pair of launches

HELSINKI — China conducted a pair of launches in recent days, adding new satellites to the SuperView and CentiSpace low Earth orbit infrastructure constellations.

The constellation is operated by China Siwei, a subsidiary of CASC, and developed by CASC's Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). The first satellites, SuperView-1 (01) and (02), were launched by a Long March 2D in December 2016, but inserted into lower-than-intended orbits, impacting mission lifetimes.

A Long March 2D hypergolic rocket lifted off at 6:51 p.m. Eastern (2251 UTC) March 25 from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northern China. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) declared the mission a success within an hour of launch, revealing the payloads to be a pair of synthetic aperture radar satellites for the SuperView remote sensing constellation.