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.