A carrier rocket launched from the waters off Shandong Province on Wednesday has sent two hyperspectral satellites into orbit, which are expected to support high-precision observation in China and large-scale monitoring of land and sea worldwide.

The Smart Dragon-3 (SD-3) carrier rocket blasted off at 10.38am near the city of Haiyang, delivering the Oriental Smart Eye (OSE) hyperspectral satellites 01 and 02 into planned orbits.

The offshore mission was conducted by the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre.

Weighing around 300 kilos each, the satellites each carry a hyperspectral imager featuring 22 calibrated spectral bands, a spatial resolution of five meters and an imaging swath of 300 kilometres.

Together, the pair is designed to provide global revisit coverage every five days, according to the developer.

The two OSE satellites can not only capture images but also interpret what they observe.

Unlike conventional optical imaging, hyperspectral observation records a detailed spectrum for each image pixel.

These "spectral fingerprints" can help distinguish materials and measure properties, including vegetation chlorophyll and moisture, water quality, soil organic matter and mineral composition.

The satellites also carry onboard artificial intelligence computing modules with computing capacity of up to 400 trillion operations per second.

The modules are designed to perform in-orbit processing, including anomaly detection, surface-feature identification, intelligent compression and feature extraction, instead of transmitting all raw imagery to the ground for processing.

This could reduce the amount of data to be downlinked and shorten the time for delivering usable information from days to minutes.

Once in operation, the pair will work with a separate high-resolution satellite already in orbit to form a system combining broad-area surveys with detailed observations. (Xinhua)



Edited by Tony Sabine