Blue Marble image of the Earth taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on Dec. 7 1972.
Image Credit: NASA
This week we’re looking at China and how quickly it has grown to arguably start to lead the world in its Earth Observation (EO) and remote sensing capabilities. Now I know some people will immediately start talking about America with both NASA and their private companies or Europe with the Copernicus programme and European Space Agency … but, have you really looked at what China is doing recently?
China has already launched 55 satellites in 2021 – with 72 launched in 2020 – and the majority of these are remote sensing EO satellites. We often write about their latest launch in the blog, and this week is no exception. On the 19th July, China launched the final triplet set of Yaogan-30 satellites from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre onboard a Long March-2C rocket. This is the tenth triplet belonging to this group, and the fifth triplet to be launched in the last eighteen months. Officially this constellation is said to be for electromagnetic environment detection, however it is also believed to undertake optical and radar imaging, together with intelligence gathering for the military.
Whilst China has been launching EO satellites for many years, most of this data was kept within China and not released any further. However, this is starting to change with resellers such as Head Aerospace offering Chinese data on its platform including both optical and radar data from the Gaofen and the Jilin constellations. With the number of satellites in these constellations providing frequent revisits, and with some optical satellites offering 0.5 m spatial resolution these datasets will be interesting to both commercial and academic entities. The rest of the remote sensing world will need to take note of what China is doing, because as they release more data commercially, their innovation will need to be considered by companies such as Planet and Satellogic, which we discussed a couple of weeks ago, as this could be a pick new player in the market.
It’s also not just satellite remote sensing. At the end of last week it was announced that the Chinese Aeronautic Remote Sensing System (CARSS) was in operation following the completion of its trials which included a calibration flight. CARSS was developed by the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences consists of two medium-sized manned aircraft with more than ten remote sensing instruments on board, which are reported as allowing the collection of data from multispectral, multi-temporal, multi-polarization, and multi-angle viewpoints. This system also has near-real time data processing capabilities and satellite communications. The images collected by this system will be used for applications such as assessing road damage, landslides, earthquakes, floods and collapsed houses.
In addition, last month China announced the completion of its global remote sensing calibration benchmark network at the Baotou site, which is located at Urad Qianqi of Inner Mongolia in northern China. This has created an efficient calibration infrastructure and scientific test platform in accordance with international standards. It shares resources with the other international calibration sites managed by USA, France and ESA, and supported the creation of the RadCalNet (Radiometric Calibration Network) for research data sharing. Alongside the core calibration facilities, it also offers hyperspectral infrared consistent transfer calibration, Lidar calibration, and has the world’s first ground-based test site to support night-time calibration.
China is making great strides with developing its EO capabilities and it is arguably leading the world in our industry, and anyone who does not keep an eye on their developments could soon find their commercial edge, unique selling point or even business disappearing.
