China’s small Beijing-3 satellite can take high-resolution images of US cities within seconds, a speed its American counterparts can’t match, scientists say

By Matthew Loh
29 December 2021

A small, one-ton Chinese satellite can quickly snap high-resolution images of US cities that are so detailed they can identify individual military vehicles and the weapons they carry, Chinese scientists involved in the Beijing-3 satellite project said on Tuesday.

The commercial Beijing-3 satellite, launched by China in June, conducted an in-depth scan of a 1,470 square-mile area in the San Francisco Bay. The satellite captured the area within 42 seconds, The South China Morning Post first reported, citing results published this month in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Spacecraft Engineering.

Beijing-3 has a unique advantage up its sleeve: It can pitch and yaw at up to 10 degrees per second while not compromising image quality as it orbits the Earth, said lead scientist Yang Fang, who headed the project run by DFH Satellite Company under the Chinese Academy of Space and Technology.

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