Launching from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China, the second flight of the Ceres-1 (Gushenxing-1) rocket has placed five payloads into LEO. Lifting off at at 0412 GMT, 7 December the rocket carried the satellites to a near 500 km, sun-synchronous orbit.
Ceres-1 is a four-stage solid-fuelled rocket developed by private Chinese company Galactic Energy. The first launch of a Ceres-1 rocket took place in November 2020.
The second flight of the Ceres-1 rocket carrying five payloads to orbit. Courtesy of Xinhua/Wang Jiangbo
On-board the mission were two remote sensing satellites (Golden Bauhinia-FIVE, Golden Bauhinia-ONE-03) for Hong Kong Aerospace Technology Group Limited (HKATG) built by Starwiz (Zhongke Xingrui Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd) and ZeroG Lab respectively. Changsa-based Spacety also had two satellites on-board, Lize-1 and Baoyun, a constellation networking technology test satellite and a GNSS occultation detection satellite respectively. Lastly, Tianjin University-1 is a infrared remote sensing satellite built by Chang Guang Satellite Technology.
