China may be having a worrying border dispute with India, but it is still launching satellites. China successfully launched the Gaofen 9-3 imaging satellite, Pixing 3A technology test sat and HEAD 1-5 AIS ship tracking satellite at 0719 GMT on 17 June on a Long March 2D (CZ-2D) launch vehicle flying from China’s Jiuquan launch site.
China has never admitted to launch any kind of military spacecraft to date and the SAST (Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology)-built Gaofen 9-3 satellite is officially to provide sub-metre resolution imagery from a sun-synchronous low Earth orbit for civil planning and disaster management. Its co-payloads were the Pixing 3A satellite which was built by Zhejiang University in China for technology testing in orbit. The HEAD 1-5 satellite carries AIS equipment to receive data on ship location and navigation status.
