China successfully launched a new pair of BeiDou navigation satellites on Sunday, Nov. 5, reports NASAspaceflight.com.
Beidou-3M1 (Beidou-24) and Beidou-3M2 (Beidou-25) went aloft aboard a Long March-3B/YZ-1 rocket at around 11:45 UTC from the LC2 Launch Complex of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, Sichuan province.
The launch, previously scheduled for July, was delayed until now due to a partial launch failure with the previous launch of this rocket during the Zhongxing-9A (ChinaSat-9A) mission, which resulted in the satellite being lofted to a lower than planned orbit.
The satellites are using a new bus that features a phased array antenna for navigation signals and a laser retroreflector.
The Beidou Phase III system includes the migration of its civil Beidou 1 or B1 signal from 1561.098 MHz to a frequency centered at 1575.42 MHz — the same as the GPS L1 and Galileo E1 civil signals — and its transformation from a quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation to a multiplexed binary offset carrier (MBOC) modulation similar to the future GPS L1C and Galileo’s E1.
