Artist impression of Sentinel-6/Jason-CS satellite. Image courtesy of ESA/ATG medialab.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) today launched the Cartosat-3 Earth Observation (EO) satellite from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
Cartosat-3 was the major payload on the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C47). It was accompanied by thirteen States commercial nanosatellites from the United States; twelve of which were Planet’s FLOCK-4P constellation. The thirteenth nanosatellite is Meshbed, built by Analytical Space Inc. for on-orbit testing of MITRE’s Frequency-scaled Ultra-wide Spectrum Element antenna which is technology demonstration flight to try to improve the speed of access to satellite data amongst other applications – and anyone who works with satellite data will be hoping this is successful!
This is the ninth satellite in the Cartosat series and will be placed into polar Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of just over 500 km with an anticipated mission life of five years. It is a very high-resolution satellite with panchromatic and multispectral capabilities. It’s believed that the panchromatic imager has a 0.25m spatial resolution with 16 km swath, whilst the multispectral imager has a 1.13m spatial resolution with 16 km swath. The data from the satellite will support applications such as urban planning, rural resource management, infrastructure development, coastal land use and land cover.
At the start of the month, China launched its latest EO satellite in its China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), Gaofen-7, onboard the Long March 4B rocket. This satellite will obtain high resolution optical 3D observation data and high-precision laser altimetry for survey and mapping that reportedly has a sub-metre spatial resolution. Similarly, to Cartosat-3, the applications for this data are expected to include land surveying and mapping, urban and rural construction planning, alongside statistical investigation.
The future satellite is ESA’s Sentinel-6A satellite, also called Jason-CS, which is about to go into its final testing ahead of its planned launch next year. It will continue the work of the Jason satellites, which we know well and use the altimetry datasets for several of our ocean products. These datasets are critical in measuring the sea levels and over the last 27 years have seen global sea levels rise by an average of 3.2mm per year, although the trend is accelerating.
Once launched it will spend some weeks orbiting alongside Jason-3 to allow for cross-calibration of the altimeters, and like other Sentinel satellites, it is anticipated that it will be a twin constellation with work beginning on Sentinel-6B in 2021.
A secondary objective is the collection of high-resolution vertical temperature profiles, using the GNSS radio-occultation sounding technique, which will support weather prediction. This instrument detects the satellite positioning signals reflected by the Earth, so a useful by-product of our need to find our position!
Finally, we noticed that Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) announced they’d signed an agreement the Republic of the Philippines’ Department of Science and Technology-Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) to provide them with tasking and data acquisition services from NovaSAR-1 over the Philippines. As we did some work on simulating NovaSAR data before it was launched, the use of this satellite’s data always catches our eye! We’re excited to see the data, and how it’s used in the Philippines.
