China launches ocean observation satellite
▶ Xi, Macron hail cooperation as important part of strategic partnership
China successfully sent an ocean-observing satellite into space on Monday, a joint mission pursued under close China-France space cooperation that will enable scientists to simultaneously study, for the first time, ocean surface winds and waves.
The China-France Oceanography Satellite (CFOSat), atop a Long March-2C carrier rocket, took off at 8:43 am from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gobi Desert and entered a sun-synchronous orbit 520 kilometers above Earth.
Jointly developed by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), France’s space agency, the satellite will conduct 24hour observations of global wave spectrums, effective wave height and ocean surface wind fields, said Zhao Jian, a senior official with CNSA.
As the first satellite-related cooperation between China and France, the CFOSat is equipped with the world’s most advanced technologies. It carries two innovative radar instruments – a wind scatterometer developed by China to measure the strength and direction of winds and a wave spectrometer developed by France to survey the length, height and direction of waves, according to Wang Lili, chief designer of the satellite at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST).
President Xi Jinping and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Monday exchanged congratulations on the successful launch of a jointly developed ocean-observing satellite.
Xi said space cooperation is an important part of the ChinaFrance comprehensive strategic partnership, and the successful launch of the jointly developed oceanography satellite represents the latest result, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
For his part, Macron said that the CFOSat launch marks an important step forward in bilateral space cooperation, said Xinhua.
According to a statement the CNSA sent to the Global Times on Monday, the CFOSat can also monitor the land surface, generating data on the moisture and roughness of the soil as well as the condition of the polar ice sheets to provide fundamental research information for global climate studies.
China is in charge of providing the satellite platform and ocean surface wind-observing load and launch tracks and controls, while France is responsible for providing a wave-monitoring load, the statement said.
The monitoring data will be shared by scientists from both countries.
The CFOSat project was approved in 2009, and during the French leader’s official visit to China this January, Macron received a scale model of the satellite.
CNSA said at the Monday launch that the Long March-2C is also carrying a science and education satellite developed by Belarusian State University and six other Chinese science and technology experiment satellites.