China's continuous progress in the military field is the focus of global attention at present, and it is not easy to build a solid foundation for national defense.
Especially in the 21st century, over-the-horizon warfare has become the mainstream, the traditional mechanized troops will be beaten by the information-based army, and the combat troops must rely on a sharp weapon if they want to have battlefield situational awareness, which is also known as the "eye in the sky" that is, reconnaissance satellites.
After years of unremitting efforts, the mainland has made remarkable achievements in this regard, and at present, in the field of reconnaissance satellites, China has surpassed the United States and Russia to the world's first position, and with this we can grasp the movements of the enemy forces at any time.
Recently, the authoritative voice of an outstanding academician of the mainland has inspired the hearts of military fans, and the reconnaissance satellite technology of the Chinese People's Liberation Army can directly lock on and monitor aircraft carriers from space.
Academician Li Deren is a leader in the field of surveying, mapping and remote sensing, and he won the highest national science and technology award in 2023.
After more than 10 years of hard work, Academician Li Deren led the team to improve the resolution accuracy of China's optical satellites from the original 3 meters to 0.5 meters, breaking the foreign monopoly on high-precision optical satellite technology, and also cultivating a group of experts in the field of satellites for the mainland.
In the past, China once relied on other countries' satellite technology for positioning and navigation, but now, with the advent of the Beidou satellite positioning system, the vast Milky Way stars have also begun to shine for China. How important is the status of Beidou satellites? American strategic experts say its emergence is the beginning of the end of US global military hegemony.
In addition to the Beidou satellite, the mainland also has the Jilin No. 1 satellite, which is the specialty of Academician Li Deren, the Jilin No. 1 satellite is the artifact that makes the United States F-22 undefeated gold body break the defense, once used 6 seconds to lock the F-22 fighter, capture its flight trajectory.
What many people don't know is that Jilin-1 is just a commercial satellite in China, which specializes in weather forecasting and helps agriculture. So how powerful will China's military remote sensing satellites be? It's hard to imagine.
In the past, the United States was the absolute boss in the field of reconnaissance satellites. In 1960, the United States launched the Keyhole 1 satellite, which has been iterated almost every decade since then, and the accuracy of the Keyhole KH-12 has reached 0.1 meters.
The United States likes to use this reconnaissance satellite most often to spy on other countries, and in several Middle East wars, this satellite has detected the military movements of Arab countries, and after analysis by the United States, it has transmitted information to Israel. During the Gulf War, the U.S. command center was able to pinpoint the location of the Iraqi Air Force's hangars, ground-based radar base stations, and even tanks in trenches, and the keyhole reconnaissance satellite was very helpful. Starting with the KH-11, keyhole satellites began to use optical digital imaging technology, and there was a qualitative leap in performance.
At a time when the United States was making great strides in the development of the keyhole series of satellites, the mainland also launched research on high-resolution optical satellites at the beginning of this century. In 2013, the GF-1 satellite entered the scheduled orbit, and as of 2024, there are already 14 GF-1 satellites in the sky, distributed in geosynchronous orbit and sun-synchronous orbit, 7 military and 7 civilian.
What is more advanced than the American keyhole series is that the mainland has used synthetic aperture radar technology, and the resolution of high-resolution military reconnaissance satellites is already less than 0.1 meters, which is stronger than the American keyhole KH-12. At an altitude of 600 kilometers, the satellite can see an A4 sheet of paper on the ground and give specific coordinate parameters.
High-resolution reconnaissance satellites played a major role in the 2016 Sino-US confrontation in the South China Sea and in 2017 in monitoring the movements of US aircraft carriers. At that time, China used high-resolution satellites to conduct all-weather tracking and reconnaissance of 11 US nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, 19 large warships, and 10 amphibious assault ships, and all movements were in the hands of the PLA. Since then, optical digital imaging technology has been carried out to conduct guidance experiments for the missile, including terrain matching and image matching.
What should a reconnaissance satellite do if it is shot down in wartime?
At present, China's aerospace science and technology are already very powerful, and it has mastered the technology of killing multiple satellites with one stone, and even if our satellites are shot down, they can be quickly supplemented with rockets, and satellites can also be deployed at different orbital altitudes. This technology is only available to China, the United States, and Russia, and of course, anti-satellite technology is currently only mastered by these three countries.
Not only that, but we also have reconnaissance drones, such as the Wuzhan-8, which flies at an altitude of 50,000 kilometers and can reach a speed of Mach 6, and even without satellites, it can accurately observe the position of US aircraft carriers. Because it flies inside the atmosphere, the speed is fast, the ceiling is high, and the United States cannot shoot down, and no missile can catch up.
Synthetic aperture radar is also used on the Wuzhan-8, which is the same as many of the technologies of reconnaissance satellites, and an optical satellite project has led to the development of many technologies.
The development of military reconnaissance satellites has also benefited the civilian sector. I don't know if you have noticed that in recent years, the weather forecast on the mainland has become more and more accurate, and the forecast in the past can only say the overall weather situation on a certain day, but now it can be accurate to the hour. Because the continent is now more accurate in its atmospheric observations, the computing power of supercomputing has also increased.