Astronomy Magazine
Places · Spaceport
Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center
Every Chinese crewed flight has left from here, in the Gobi desert, and the Shenzhou capsules come back a few hundred kilometres away.
- Where
- Inner Mongolia, China
- Coordinates
- 40.96°N 100.29°E
- Since
- 1970
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- cmse.gov.cn
The sky from here
This is a zone 4 sky — suburban edge on the nine-grade scale, Bortle 4–5, reaching roughly magnitude 5.7–6.5 unaided. The Milky Way is a faint band overhead and gone lower down. The sky is noticeably grey rather than black.
That grade puts 99 of the catalogue within easy reach of 10×50 binoculars and 100 within a 130mm — 21 of them need no instrument at all. Genuinely dark sky — zone 2 or darker — starts about 15 km north-east.
There is no season here in which the sky fails to get properly dark — the Sun clears eighteen degrees below the horizon on all 365 nights.
The centre of the galaxy reaches 20° at its highest, which puts the brightest part of the Milky Way clear of the horizon murk without ever being overhead. Of the 110 Messier objects, 11 never set from here and every one of them rises at some point in the year.
Of everything in the catalogue, Cat's Eye Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and Sunflower Galaxy are the best served here, climbing to within a few degrees of straight up — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Little Dumbbell, Pinwheel Galaxy and Owl Nebula never set from this latitude, so they are available on any clear night of the year rather than for one season of it.
Read at 40.96°N 100.29°E. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
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Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center?
Everything south of declination −49°. From 41.0°N that is a cap 41° in radius centred on the south celestial pole, which is 12% of the whole celestial sphere. That part of the sky is not merely a winter object or a difficult one; it is geometrically unavailable from this latitude. The equivalent cap around the north celestial pole is the compensation, and it never sets.
How many hours of true darkness does Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center get?
From about 4 hours 37 minutes at the thin end of the year, near 21 June, up to 11 hours 28 minutes around 21 December. The measure is astronomical darkness — the Sun a full eighteen degrees under — not simply the hours between sunset and sunrise. Unlike sites further from the equator, no part of the year here is written off entirely.
What orbits can be reached from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center?
Anything inclined at 41.0° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 41.0°N arrives in an orbit inclined at 41.0° — the shallowest the site can reach without spending propellant to turn the plane — and steeper orbits are simply a matter of launching on a different heading. The Space Station's 51.6°, and any polar or sun-synchronous orbit, are all available from here. What the latitude charges for is the other direction: a geostationary orbit sits at 0° inclination, and all 41.0° of the difference has to be bought back with propellant that could have been payload.
How far is Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center from the other sites on this map?
Its closest neighbour on this map is Dongfeng landing site, 47 km away to the north. The nearest other spaceport is Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, 993 km to the east. Measured as the great circle between coordinates, which is the shortest path across the surface and rarely the one you could travel.