Artist’s rendition of a satellite – mechanik/123RF Stock Photo
A new Chinese launch vehicle had its inaugural flight last weekend from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China. The Smart Dragon-1, also known by its Chinese name of Jielong-1, was developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT).
It’s a four-stage solid-fuel launch vehicle that is capable of launching a 200 kg payload into a low Earth orbit of around 500km, or a 150 kg payload to 700 km altitude. It will operate on a commercial business model, with reported prices being approximately $30,000 per kilogram for a launch. It had three satellites on its first flight, including two Earth Observation (EO) microsatellites which it deposited into sun-synchronous orbits at altitudes of approximately 550 km. The satellites were:
-  Qiansheng 01A – a 65 kg EO imaging microsatellite with a sub-two-metre spatial resolution. It’s owned by Beijing Qiansheng Exploration Technology Co. Ltd and is the first in a potential fleet of twenty-four satellites providing remote sensing and communication operations.
- Xingshidai 5 – a small 10 kg EO microsatellite owned by Guoxing Aerospace Technology of Chengdu and built by MinoSpace Technology of Beijing Technology Co. Ltd.
- Tianqi 2 – a satellite providing Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications that follows Tianqi-1 and 3 launched in October 2018 and June 2019 respectively, more launches are planned to create a constellation.
The first of the new images comes from ICEYE, the Finnish synthetic aperture radar (SAR) small satellite company, who last week released the first sub-one metre SAR image from a satellite weighing less than 100 kg. The image showed a port container terminal near Port Harcourt in Nigeria and was processed at 0.5 m ground resolution. The image can be seen here. ICEYE currently has four satellites in orbit, and plans to increase this to almost twenty over the coming few years. The obvious strength of SAR imagery is that it can take images during the day and night, and is completely unaffected by cloud.
The second image comes from the United Arab Emirates satellite, KhalifaSat, which we wrote about at its launch last October. It’s an optical imager, with a spatial resolution of just under three metres in multispectral mode, and it has captured a fantastic image of the Grand Mosque of Makkah on the first afternoon of Eid Al Adha during the Hajj pilgrimage. The mass of pilgrims gathered in the centre of the mosque can be clearly seen. The image is available here.
Finally, the anniversary part of the blog comes from Turkey where its first EO satellite, RASAT, has just completed eight years in space which is five years longer than the original planned mission life. The Optical Imaging System onboard operates with a pushbroom imager and has a 30 km swath and has a spatial resolution of 7.5 m in panchromatic mode and 15 m in multispectral mode for colour images. During its life, it has circled the Earth over 42,000 times in a sun-synchronous orbit and acquired almost three thousand images spanning 15 million square kilometres. Its data is used for land cover surveys, ecosystem monitoring, disaster management and coastal zone management.
This is just a snapshot of some highlights that have happened this week in the EO industry!
