JIUQUAN — China successfully sent a new group of remote sensing satellites into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Saturday.

The four satellites of PIESAT-2 were launched at 11:39 a.m. (Beijing time) by a Long March 2C carrier rocket and successfully entered their planned orbit.

They will mainly provide commercial remote sensing data services.

This is the 544th flight mission in the Long March carrier rocket series.

In March 2023, China launched PIESAT-1 or Hongtu-1, a wheel-shaped formation consisting of four satellites, the first such formation in the world. They then successfully obtained high-precision terrain mapping data products using multi-baseline interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technology, marking the first on-orbit application of such a mapping system in China.