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 –
More at
- China launches six Yunhai-2 satellites for atmospheric environment research – Xinhua | English.news.cn
- Long March 2D concludes 2018 campaign with Hongyan-1 launch – NASASpaceFlight.com (NSF seems to have gotten the payload wrong.)
** 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).
More at:
- Soyuz 2-1A launches Kanopus-V pair and additional payloads – NASASpaceFlight.com
- Soyuz launches cluster of 28 satellites – Spaceflight Now
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