China's largest rocket apparently wasn't big enough to launch the country's newest spy satellite, so engineers gave the rocket an upgrade.
The Long March 5 launcher flew with a payload fairing some 20 feet taller than its usual nose cone when it took off on Friday with a Chinese military spy satellite.
This made the Long March 5, with a height of some 200 feet, the tallest rocket China has ever flown.
Adding to the intrigue, the Chinese government claimed the spacecraft aboard the Long March 5 rocket, named Yaogan-41, is a high-altitude optical remote-sensing satellite.
First, assuming China's official description is accurate, the satellite could be heading for a perch in geosynchronous orbit, a position that would afford any Earth-facing sensors continuous views of a third of the world's surface.
Because this mission launched on China's most powerful rocket, with the longer payload fairing added on, the Yaogan-41 spacecraft is presumably quite big.
The US military's space-tracking network found the Yaogan-41 satellite in an elliptical, or oval-shaped, orbit soon after Friday's launch.
Yaogan-41's trajectory takes it between an altitude of about 121 miles and 22,254 miles, according to publicly available tracking data.
It's likely in the coming weeks that the Yaogan-41 satellite will maneuver into this more circular orbit, where it would maintain an altitude of 22,236 miles and perhaps nudge itself into an orbit closer to the equator.
In an official statement, China's state-run Xinhua news agency claimed Yaogan-41 will be used for civilian purposes, such as land surveys and agricultural monitoring.
In reality, China uses the Yaogan name as a blanket identifier for most of its military satellites.
US military officials will closely watch to see where Yaogan-41 ends up.
From such a high altitude, Yaogan-41's optical imager won't have the sharp vision of a satellite closer to Earth.
It's easy to imagine the benefits of all-day coverage, even at lower resolution, without China's military needing to wait hours for a follow-up pass over a potential target from another satellite in low-Earth orbit.
In August, China launched a synthetic aperture radar surveillance satellite into a geosynchronous-type orbit using a medium-lift Long March 7 rocket.
Optical payloads, like the one on Yaogan-41, are restricted to daytime observations over cloud-free regions.
China launched a smaller optical remote-sensing satellite into geosynchronous orbit in 2015, ostensibly for civilian purposes.
Although Chinese officials did not disclose the exact capabilities of Yaogan-41, it would almost certainly have the sensitivity to continually track US Navy ships and allied vessels across a wide swath of the Indo-Pacific.
Aside from its use of the larger payload fairing, the Long March 5 rocket used to launch Yaogan-41 can haul approximately 31,000 pounds of payload mass into the orbit it reached on Friday's launch.
Notably, China acknowledged Yaogan-41's purpose as an optical-imaging satellite.
This Cyber News was published on packetstormsecurity.com. Publication date: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 15:13:18 +0000