China launches world’s first meteorological satellite into dawn-dusk orbit

Reportedly, it is world's first meteorological satellite for civil service in a dawn-dusk orbit.

A dawn-to-dusk orbit is a sun-synchronous orbit in which the satellite tracks but never moves into the Earth's shadow.

The FY-3E satellite is dubbed as a ‘dawn satellite’ as it is likely to serve to collect meteorological observations in the early morning.

The satellite is equipped with 11 advanced remote sensing payloads, with a lifespan of eight years.

It will constellate with FY-3C and FY-3D satellites in orbit.

Such networking helps in data collections for predicting weather in the dawn, morning and afternoon.

In addition, the networking can scan the globe six times a day, obtain global meteorological data within four hours, and enhance early weather forecasting time by twelve hours.

In future, the observation data of FY-3E will be available to the whole world, which will improve the accuracy and efficiency of global numerical weather prediction.

The satellite will mainly obtain data about temperature, humidity, and other meteorological parameters for numerical prediction applications, improving China's weather forecast capabilities.

Moreover, it will also monitor the global snow and ice coverage, sea surface temperature, natural disasters.

The dawn satellite will also monitor solar and space environments and their effects on Earth.