Long March 4C lifts off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Dec. 27, 2020.
China completed a busy year that saw the nation tie its own record for launch attempts with the successful orbiting of a remote sensing satellite and a secondary nanosat on Sunday.
A Long March 4C rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 11:44 p.m.. local time carrying the Yaogan Weixing-33 (R) spacecraft. The spacecraft will be “mainly used for scientific experiment research, marine and land resource surveys and other tasks,” the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said.
Yaogan Weixing-33 (R) is the replacement for a similarly named remote sensing satellite that was lost due to the failure of a Long March 4C booster in May 2019.
China named the satellite ‘Yaogan Weixing-33’, but on May 22, 2019, another Yaogan Weixing-33 was lost on a Long March-4C launch failure that occurred a few minutes after launch from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center.
The lost Yaogan-33 was likely the second satellite of the successor series to the Yaogan Weixing-1 (Jianbing-5) class space-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. The first satellite of this second generation SAR was Yaogan-29, launched on November 26, 2015.
Another small satellite, Weina Jishu Shiyan, was also launched on this mission. The small satellite will be used for scientific research, according to the Chinese media.
Both satellites have become the final satellites to be orbited by China in 2020 and the last satellites on the nation’s 13th Five-Year Plan.