BEIJING, October 10. /TASS/. China has successfully launched 27th batch of SatNet communications satellites into low-Earth orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) reported.

According to a post on its official account on WeChat, a Chinese social media and messaging platform, the launch took place aboard a Long March-12 (CZ-12) carrier rocket at 3:27 a.m. Beijing time on Saturday (7:27 p.m. GMT on Friday) from the commercial launch site at the Wenchang Space Launch Site in the Hainan Province in southern China.

The CZ-12 is a two-stage, liquid-propellant rocket with a liftoff thrust of 5,000 kilonewtons. It has a payload fairing diameter of either 5.2 or 4.2 meters, is 62 meters long and can carry at least six metric tons into a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 700 kilometers. This was the rocket’s ninth launch and its fifth in the current year.