THE FIRST METEOROLOGICAL SATELLITE OF CHINA——FENGYUN-1

At 0430 Beijing summer Time7 September 1988, the first Chinese meteorological satellite.named Fengyun-1(FY-1 meaning observing the wind and clouds in the atmosphere) waslaunched into the near-polar sun-synchronous orbit successfully at the Taiyuan SatelliteLaunching Center, Shanxi Province by Long March-4 launching vehicle which was developedby the Ministry of Aeronautics and Astronautics.FY-1 satellite is a hexahedron of 1.4m×1.4m×1.2m (Fig.1). The attitude of satellite