A Kuaizhou 1A rocket lifts off Saturday from the Taiyuan space base with the Jilin 1 Gaofen 02B Earth-imaging satellite.

The Jilin 1 Gaofen 02B spacecraft joins a fleet of commercial Earth-imaging stations owned by partner CGSTL. The new satellite is the 15th spacecraft launched in the Jilin 1 fleet since 2015, and will be capable of collecting imagery with a resolution of better than 2.5 feet (75 centimeters).

The satellite is mainly used for land census, urban planning, land rights, road network design, crop estimation and disaster prevention and mitigation, etc., and can provide information guarantee for the construction of the Belt and Road and the modernization of national defense.

The Jilin-1 High Resolution 02 satellites features an imaging system with a resolution of 0.75 m in panchromatic mode, better than 3 m in multispectral mode, an image swath of 40 km from a 535 km high orbit. The satellites operate in pussh-broom mode and are capable of imaging up to 45° off-track.