Rocket launches: Chinese Long March-2D + Soyuz-2.1a

A couple of launches by China and Russia finish out a busy year of global rocket traffic:

** Chinese Long March-2D/YZ-3 (Chang Zheng-2D/YZ-3) rocket launch today with six atmospheric environment research satellites from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center –

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** Russian Soyuz-2.1a launched two remote sensing satellites plus 26 educational and commercial small satellites:

From the caption:

A Soyuz-2.1a (Союз-2.1а) launch vehicle, with a Fregat (Фрегат) upper stage, launched the Kanopus-V №5 (Канопус-В № 5) and Kanopus-V №6 (Канопус-В № 6) remote sensing satellites from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia, on 27 December 2018, at 02:07 UTC (11:07 local time). As secondary payloads, Soyuz-2.1a launched 26 small satellites: GRUS (Axelspace), Flock 3k (twelve Planet Labs Inc 3U Dove CubeSats), ZACube-2, Lume-1 cubesat, D-Star ONE (iSat), D-Star ONE (Sparrow), eight Lemur-class satellites (Spire Global Inc) and UWE-4 (Würzburg University).

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