For celebrating the huge breakthrough of the newest meteorological satellites, WeChat, China's most popular instant messaging application, replaced its composite logon picture on Monday. It will use an image recently taken by the Fengyun 4A satellite until Thursday.

WeChat users had been greeted by a silhouette figure staring off at the Earth whenever using the app. The original image of the planet was the iconic “Blue Marble”, taken by Apollo 17 spacecraft on December 7, 1972, at a distance of about 29,000 kilometers from the surface, which was regarded as the first picture of the Earth.

Since the “Fengyun-4A”, China's newest meteorological satellite, began operating on September 25, the background of WeChat's starting image has been changed into a new cloud imaginary taken by the Chinese satellite.

The new-generation satellite is equipped with the world's first vertical atmospheric detector, and was the world’s first time applied multi-channel scanning radiometer as well as vertical atmospheric sounding and microwave detector, which enabled to address 3D remote sensing at geostationary altitudes.

While the Blue Marble image prominently features the continent of Africa, the new photo presents the universe perspective of Asia and the rest of the Eastern Hemisphere.

According to WeChat, the change is based on the belief, “Africa is the birthplace of mankind and an appropriate image for an app that was just starting out. The existence and meaning of communication [are] because of the appearance of mankind. But now the using of [a] picture taken by the FY-4 illustrated the willing of drawing the attention of millions of users to the wonders of Chinese civilization as well as its landscape.”

Such a change will remain until 5 p.m. on Thursday.