Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. announced Tuesday it has just completed a commercial satellite contract with Beijing Landview Mapping Information Technology Co., marking the first attempt to commercialize data services using Earth-observation satellites.
At a ceremony held in Beijing, BLMIT signed the formal in-orbit acceptance of the Beijing-1 high-resolution EO micro-satellite system built in cooperation with SSTL.
The Beijing-1 micro-satellite, launched in October 2005 with a life expectancy of more than five years, was delivered to a 686-kilometer (425-mile) low-Earth orbit by SSTL.
BLMIT and SSTL have since worked together to evaluate its performance in orbit and also exploring its full operational potential, offered by the 14 different operational modes and re-configurable on-board hardware and the software to respond to the requirements of end-users.
The 166-kilogram (365-pound) Beijing-1 carries two payloads that provide high-resolution (4-meter) panchromatic images along with medium-resolution (32-meter) multi-spectral images with an ultra-wide 600-kilometer (375-mile) imaging swath.
Beijing-1 may join the internationally coordinated Disaster Monitoring Constellation, led by SSTL, which includes satellites from Algeria, Nigeria, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
With five satellites working together, the DMC is able to gather images of a given location daily, thus mitigating cloud cover and monitoring dynamic or rapidly changing phenomena in a way single satellites cannot.
Beijing-1 will provide the Chinese government and commercial users with information on agriculture, water resources, environment and disaster monitoring throughout China.
The satellite will be used extensively for monitoring urban development and pollution, especially in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and to generate digital maps of China using the high-resolution panchromatic imager.
The satellite is capable of continuously imaging Chinese territory even at the longest landmass track (3,000 kilometers or 1,860 miles) and transmit images to the ground station in Beijing in real-time at 40 megabits per second with on-board programmable compression.
Image data gathered outside the reach of the ground station is stored on-board in a hard disc mass storage device for retrieval at night or later on demand.
BLMIT, a private company established to manage the commercial data distribution and services of Beijing-1, is undertaking a project to obtain cloud-free images to map the whole China within six months.
