China’s Beidou navigation system fully operational
August 4, 2020 Category IT & Telecom, Weekly
Chinese President Xi Jinping attended a ceremony in Beijing to mark the launch of full global services of the Beidou-3 Navigation Satellite System, indicating that China’s domestically-developed and independently-operated global satellite navigation system has been fully completed. The Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) is China’s largest space-based system and one of four global navigation networks, alongside the U.S.’ GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo. It provides global users with basic navigation, global short message communication, and international search and rescue services. At present, the system’s services cover more than 200 countries and regions, with more than 100 million users and 200 million daily services. “Beidou is not only China’s Beidou, but also the world’s Beidou. It not only serves China, but also serves the world,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said.
The BDS system has been completed in 26 years since it was first started in 1994. More than 400 entities and over 300,000 scientists worked on the project since its inception. On June 23, the Long March-3B launch vehicle, carrying the last satellite of the BDS, blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Xichang, Sichuan province. The satellite was the 55th in the Beidou system, and has begun providing navigation, positioning and timing services. From November 2017 to June 2020, in 31 months, China successfully launched 30 Beidou-3 network satellites and two BeiDou-2 backup satellites, at a success rate of 100%, creating a new record for the world’s satellite navigation system network launch, with the speed of deployment exceeding an average of one satellite every month. The system is completely free from imports of core components as they are 100% home-made. “Key technologies that cannot be brought or obtained from other countries, especially during this pandemic period, sometimes decide the level of a country’s development. The only way for a country to achieve long-term stability and prosperity is to make utmost efforts to ensure their independent development of high technology,” Gao Lingyun, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), told the Global Times.
The successful launch of BDS ensures the satellite navigation industry enters “a new golden age” in terms of comprehensive applications, insiders said. China’s domestic satellite navigation and location service sector has grown to around 14,000 companies with over 500,000 workers in five main industry clusters across the country. China’s BDS played an important role in providing mapping services that supported the rapid construction of the Huoshenshan and Leishenshan temporary hospitals in Wuhan at the beginning of the year, when the city was struck by the outbreak of Covid-19. BDS terminals were also carried to the top of Mount Qomolangma for the first time in late May to help a Chinese surveying team measure the height of the world’s tallest mountain. By the end of 2019 on the Chinese mainland, more than 6.5 million road vehicles, 40,000 postal and express delivery vehicles, 80,000 buses in 36 major cities, 3,200 inland navigation facilities, and 2,900 marine navigation facilities were using services from BDS, forming the world’s largest dynamic monitoring system for road vehicles. In the first quarter of 2020, more than 70% of smartphones in China used Beidou services. A report by the GNSS and LBS Association of China showed that the industry’s market scale is expected to exceed CNY400 billion by the end of 2020, up from CNY340 billion in 2019.
China has also achieved other successes in space. In January 2019, China’s Chang’e-4 probe touched down on the far side of the moon, becoming the first spacecraft to make a soft-landing on the moon’s uncharted side that is never visible from earth. In July, China successfully launched its first Mars probe, Tianwen-1, on a Long March-5 Y4 carrier rocket from Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province. The move heralded a new era for China’s deep-space exploration that has steadily progressed beyond moon probes to interplanetary missions, the Global Times reports.
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