Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
Last Thursday, 6th August, China launched its latest Goafen satellite from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia. The satellite, Gaofen 9 (04), was sent into a polar orbit at an altitude of 500 km by the Long March 2D rocket.
This is the fourth of the Goafen 9 satellites and is a high-resolution optical Earth Observation (EO) satellite believed to have a sub-metre spatial resolution. It is part of the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), although the Goafen 9 satellites are reported as being under civilian control. The data from the satellite is expected to be used for applications such as land surveys, urban planning, transportation, crop yields and disaster support.
Launched alongside this was the Tsinghua gravity and atmosphere scientific satellite, or Q-SAT, developed by Tsinghua University in Beijing. It is a small spherical satellite, which will collect data on atmospheric density and the gravity field.
The day after China’s launch, SpaceX launched another 57 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral on a Falcon 9 rocket. This is the twelfth launch during 2020 and takes the overall constellation to close to 600 in size. SpaceX is reported as currently building 120 Starlink satellites every month and so it is no surprise it has had so many launches this year. Whilst it appears to be getting close the minimum number it needs to start offering minimal internet services it is still a long way away from its ambition of a 12,000 satellite constellation.
Ride-sharing with Starlink were two BlackSky Global EO satellites. This takes the BlackSky constellation to six of a planned sixteen satellite constellation, which they hope to have in place next year. Each satellite has an imaging telescope offering both visible and panchromatic imagery at a sub-metre spatial resolution with a swath width of thirty square kilometres. The full constellation will offer hourly revisit times for most of the major cities of the world.
Finally, away from satellites, NASA has a new option for capturing EO data with the announcement of a partnership with Swift Engineering to develop a drone that could stay in orbit for 30 days. The High-Altitude Long-Endurance (HALE) unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) weighs 180 lbs, it is solar-powered and can fly at an altitude of just over 20 km. It can carry a payload of 15 lbs, and recently completed a successful two-hour test flight with  NASA’s FluidCam, a video camera coupled with artificial intelligence processing.
NASA believes this can offer a unique option for capturing EO data to complement other satellite and aircraft sensors, in areas such as agriculture, forestry, air quality monitoring, coastal zone imaging and disaster response.
Another busy week for both airborne and satellite remote sensing!
