Space lab launches 'Selfie Stick'

The Tiangong II space laboratory released its companion satellite, Banxing-2, at 7:31 am on Sunday.

Weighing 47 kilograms and roughly the size of a desktop printer, the microsatellite has a series of visible light cameras, including a 25 megapixel camera and wide-angle imagers. Its mission is to take photographs of Tiangong II and the Shenzhou XI spacecraft, which docked with the lab on Wednesday.

The satellite, which China Central TV has nicknamed "Selfie Stick", also has an infrared camera that is temperature-sensitive, said Chen Hongyu, chief engineer of the satellite program and a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Micro-satellite Innovation Institute.