China Launches First 6G Satellite Into The Orbit, Leaving The World Behind

by Shatakshi Gupta

Where most of the countries have not even started rolling out 5G, here comes China which becomes world’s first in launching the 6G satellite into the orbit. This 6G satellite has been launched for testing the new bands of spectrum that are to be used in future for communications. 

It was on 6 November 2020, when China launched total of 13 satellites, and out of these 10 were from Argentina. All of these satellites were sent into orbit using China’s Long March-6 carrier rocket that took off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi province. 

It was in 2019 itself when China already started developing its next-generation internet, not only this, 6G mobile internet is being expected to be rolled out in the country by the year 2030. 

The 70kg-6G experimental satellite is named after the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. It was jointly developed by Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology, UESTC, and Beijing MinoSpace Technology.

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This satellite will be used for the verification of 6G’s performance in space as 6G frequency band would also expand from the current 5G millimetre wave frequency to the terahertz frequency.

This time 6G technology has set higher expectations to meet, which would be 100 times faster than the present 5G. 

This 6G satellite is carrying an optical remote sensing load system in order to keep check over crop disasters, forest fires, floods over mountains, water conservancy, resources of forests and so on. It will help by providing numerous satellite images as well as data. 

It was a big day for China as this launch was the biggest launch of foreign satellites by it. Ten commercial remote sensing satellites named as NewSat9-18, developed by an Argentinian Company, Satellogic, were sent into orbit via China’s launching vehicle.