ASM
Beijing-1 Control
Beijing Landview Mapping Information Technology, celebrated ISPRS by allowing the general public into the control centre for the Beijing-1 satellite, situated in suburban Beijing.
BLMIT was established to manage the acquisition and operation of Beijing-1. The company is a subsidiary of Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology Co, China Aero Geophysical Survey, the Remote Sensing Centre for Land Resources and the National Geomatics Centre of China.
While the acquisition of the satellite was paid for by the central government, the operation of the downstation and the satellite over the next five years is expected to be self-funding.
Cash flow is generated from the sale of data, either fresh tasking or from the data archive. Most of the customers are government user agencies. The whole exercise is part of an experiment by central government to see whether such a funding arrangement can be made to work in the Chinese context.
The satellite itself is about a metre cube. (A model is on display in the control centre.) It has solar panels on three sides, with a telescope mounted on top of the main assembly. It weighs 166 kg and swings around the Earth 686 km up, taking about 100 minutes for each orbit.
The pan sensor yields four-metre pixels, which can be geo-referenced to within two pixels, said a company spokesman. The multispectral sensor has a green, red and near infrared sensor about equal to Landsat bands 2,3 and 4. It has 32-metre spatial resolution.
The prime contractor for the build of Beijing-1 was Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in the UK. It works as part of SSTL's Disaster Managing constellation, a group of small satellites owned by Algeria, Nigeria, Spain, Turkey, China and the UK. Each satellite is owned and controlled by an agency in its respective country, and and is responsible for the sale and distribution of the data in that country.
All the international arrangements are handled by DMCii, a UK-registered subsidiary of SSTL.
The system is designed so that country agencies can gain experience in operating a downstation, controlling a satellite and distributing and using the data in-country. However, the satellites also make a contribution to emergency data supply during a natural disaster, as occurred, for instance, in the Sichuan earthquake, forest fires in Greece, flooding around the world and many other incidents. The number of satellites makes it possible to guarantee at least daily revisits anywhere on Earth. This means that, cloud cover aside, emergency managers can be guaranteed a daily situation report during a disaster.
A spokesman for the company said that so far, the experiment seems to be working well. Revenue has doubled in the last 12 months compared to the previous year, when the company was founded - even though all the Sichuan data was supplied for free.
