China initiated a new era in its space exploration with the debut of a new family of launch vehicle. The first Long March-6 (Chang Zheng-6) rocket was successfully launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, with a multi-payload cargo of 20 small satellites. Launch took place at 23:01:14.331 UTC on Saturday(07:01 Sep. 20, 2015 Local time).
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The ZDPS-2 Zheda Pixing-2 satellites is a dual satellite platform mission designed by Zhejiang University to provide a technology demonstration of guidance, navigation and control (GNC) strategies for spacecraft formation flying.
ZDPS-2 is the latest Nano-satellite mission of Microsat Research Center, Zhejiang University. It constitutes an in-orbit test platform for formation flying technology with two identical nano-satellites, ZDPS-2A and ZDPS-2B.
The main objectives of ZDPS-2 mission are to demonstrate advanced guidance, navigation and control algorithms for formation flying; in-orbit performance test of self-designed ammonia micro-propulsion system; validate the precision of the S-Band Inter-Satellite Pseudo-Noise (PN) code ranging system; to validate the dual-frequency GPS receiver and the relative orbit determination algorithm; and to validate the MEMS accelerometer in-orbit calibration algorithm.
The main subsystems and components of the ZDPS-2 gained space heritage on the ZDPS-1A mission launched on September 22, 2010. Both ZDPS-2A and ZDPS-2B are 25 × 25 × 25 cm cube-shaped and weigh around 12 kg.
... (Source: NASASpaceflight)
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