Gao fen provides eye in the sky

China is speeding up the formation of a high-resolution Earth observation system to get rid of its heavy reliance on foreign satellites, project officials said on Friday.

"Gaofen-2 will work with Gaofen-1 and our remote-sensing satellites to improve China's high-resolution Earth observation network and help alleviate the country's heavy dependence on foreign satellites' data," Xu Dazhe, director of the China National Space Administration, said at a news conference in Beijing on Friday to mark Gaofen-2's delivery to users.

Gaofen-2, which was launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi province in August, is capable of observing and distinguishing a 1-meter-long object in full color from 600 kilometers above Earth. Scientists and engineers spent nearly seven months on a host of in-orbit tests that produced nearly 1,000 panchromatic and multispectral images, according to the administration.