China and Brazil announced they will send another satellite into
space this year, following agreement on the joint earth resource
satellite in Beijing this past weekend.
Brazilian ambassador, H.E. Affonso Celsode Ouro-Preto, said the
CBERS-02 satellite has already been constructed by the Brazilian
National Institute for Space Research and was transported to the
Chinese Academy of Space Technology for debugging before
launch.
The ambassador and Luan Enjie, director of the China National Space
Administration announced the cooperative effort at a ceremony
commemorating two-years of it's first joint resource satellite, the
CBERS-01.
The first satellite was successfully launched on October 1, 1999,
at the Taiyuan satellite launch center in North China's Shanxi
Province. The satellite went into operation after several in-orbit
tests, ending China's dependence on foreign satellite data.
The CBERS-01 is still in orbit, despite the fact that its two-year
life-expectancy has expired. The two governments are also working
on the development of a third and fourth satellite, said Luan.
Luan said the CBERS-01 joint program, hailed by Chinese President
Jiang Zemin as an "excellent example of South-South Cooperation,"
was the first space technology project China jointly developed with
another developing country.
With its launch and operation, China reached the advanced world
level of the 1990s in the field of earth resources satellites,
according to Luan.
The China Resource Satellite Application Center has received about
230,000 data pictures provided by the CBERS-01 and the data covers
96 percent of China's territory.
"If there weren't any clouds above the territory, the satellite
would cover all of China," said Liu Jibing, minister of the State
Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National
Defense.
The satellite data includes agricultural monitoring, natural
disaster monitoring and assessment, forest and grassland surveys
and data for urban development.
The Brazil ambassador said Sino-Brazilian space-technology
cooperation has benefited his country economically and
politically.
"It (the CBERS-01) not only provided useful information for our
country, but also made Brazil independent of developed countries in
using data from a resource satellite," he said.
Brazil is among the top three users of data provided by an earth
resource satellite, the ambassador added.
"Based on the common interests, it's a real cooperation between two
developing countries," said the ambassador.
China and Brazil signed the Protocol on the Approval of the
Research and Production of the Earth Resources Satellite in July
1988.
Since then, the two sides reached several more agreements on the
development of space technology.
(China
Daily March 5, 2002)