China Review News (CRN) recently reported that the Remote Sensing and Digital Earth Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences officially launched a satellite receiving station in Hainan Province. This extended China’s direct data receiving capabilities to the South China Sea. For a long period of time, China has suffered from not having sufficient data from remote sensing satellites. The new station was equipped with dual large-sized satellite dishes as well as long distance fiber data communication systems. The station is not only tasked with communicating directly with several Chinese environment and disaster monitoring satellites and earth resource satellites. It was also assigned the mission of accepting data from Pakistani satellites. The Chinese government has plans to double the capacity of this station over the next two years. The new station is strategically important because it is part of a three station national land-based satellite data receiving infrastructure. The other two stations are located in Beijing and Xinjiang.
Source: China Review News, May 25, 2013
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