China launched a scientific satellite that will help nations meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A Long March-6 carrier rocket sent it to orbit from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center on Friday. Code-named "SDGSAT-1," it's the very first satellite on Earth to help realize the 17 goals in the "2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" set by the UN in 2015 to stimulate actions in solving social, economic and environmental problems for humanity and the planet.

Satellite Navigation, an international academic journal in the field of satellite navigation in China, was included In October 2021 in ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index), a database of Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters).

A satellite-airborne-ground synthesis experiment was conducted in Huailai from July 13th to October 1, 2021, covering an experimental area of 900 km2 surrounding the Huailai Remote Sensing Comprehensive Test Site in Hebei province. The experiment was organized by the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science in partnership with 11 research institutes or universities, and involved more than 100 technicians.

A low-light remote sensing on-orbit calibration experiment, organized by a research team from the Key Laboratory of Quantitative Remote Sensing Information Technology under the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) , was conducted on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau from September 14 to 28, 2021.

A research team led by Prof. Meng Qingyan from the National Engineering Laboratory for Satellite Remote Sensing Applications under the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has published a paper on the Remote Sensing of Environment. The title of the paper is “Spatially variable model for extracting TIR anomalies before earthquakes: Application to Chinese Mainland”, and the first author is Dr. ZHANG Ying.

On September 23, 2021, the first science committee conference on Cooperation on Accessing and Application the Spaceborne Hyperspectral Data (CASH) was held in Zhuhai. The conference was hosted by the National Earth Observation Data Center (NODA), co-organized by the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Zhuhai Orbita Aerospace Science and Technology Co., Ltd.