China launched its first flat-panel stackable satellite with a flexible solar wing on Sunday, along with another three remote sensing satellites, from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China’s Shanxi Province.
Sent by a Long March-2D rocket which blasted off at 10:50 a.m. Beijing Time, all four satellites have entered their preset orbit.
The three remote sensing satellites, one developed by Chinese private company Skysight and the other two by Beijing-based aerospace company GalaxySpace, will be used for remote sensing observation and application with respective payloads.
This is the 479th launch mission of the Long March carrier rocket family. The communications satellite, known as Lingxi-03, developed by GalaxySpace, is the first in China to use a flexible solar wing that is small, lightweight and features modularization.
The wing is extremely thin, with a thickness of about 1 millimeter for a single-layer flexible solar panel.
It can be folded with a thickness of less than 5 centimeters when loaded inside the rocket but can stretch to a length of about 9 meters and a width of more than 2.5 meters when working in orbit.
Compared to conventional solar wings, the flexible one provides a larger surface area, enabling it to absorb more solar energy. Sunday’s launch also marks the first in-orbit verification of multi-satellite stack launch technology in China, providing technical support for the rapid deployment of the country’s large-scale low-Earth orbit communication constellation.
