FORMOSAT-2 Satellite Images for Daily Monitoring
- Paper number
IAC-05-B1.4.02
- Author
Dr. An-Ming Wu, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Mr. Yung Liu, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Dr. Lance Wu, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Dr. Frank Wu, Taiwan, China
- Coauthor
Dr. Ching-Jyh Shieh, Taiwan, China
- Year
2005
- Abstract
FORMOSAT-2 satellite was launched on May 20, 2004, and is currently on a Sun-synchronous orbit with 891 km altitude, 99.1 deg inclination, and 9:45 local time of descending node. It can take images for 14 strips of worldwide areas each day to provide daily environment monitoring. The image taken by the remote sensing instrument (RSI) on board is to have in the nadir direction a swath width of 24 km and a field of regard of +/-45 deg for along-track and cross-track viewing. RSI will provide images for 2 m ground sampling distance (GSD) in panchromatic band and 8 m GSD in four multispectral bands. The daily repetitivity of FORMOSAT-2 simplifies operations, scheduling, and processing, and users are easy to request images for urgent needs. According to the orbit passing the14 strips, we name the orbit imaging for Taiwan as orbit 1. The orbits 2, 3,4 are for Asia, orbits 5,6 are for Europe and Africa, orbit 7,8,9,10 for America, and orbits 11,12,13,14 for Pacific Ocean. Since FORMOSAT-2 took the first image on June 4, 2004, the commissioning phase completed in the first two months. The satellite had its initial applications on disaster investigation after typhoons Mindulle and Aele passing, which caused landslides in Taiwan in July and August, respectively. It occurred catastrophe earthquake and tsunami in southern Asia on Dec. 26, 2004, and caused a huge disaster in countries around Indian Ocean. Since the disaster areas were located in the coverage of orbit 2, FORMOSAT-2 took images of these areas everyday for four weeks from Dec. 28, 2004 to Jan. 24, 2005, including the west coast of Thailand, Sumatra of Indonesia, southeast coast of India, Sri Lanka, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Myanmar, and Maldives to support rescues, investigations, and researches. The images have been available free-of-charge on the NSPO website, and more than 60 countries have downloaded what they needed. FORMOSAT-2 satellite will complement the existing imaging satellites like SPOT-5, IKONOS, and QuickBird. With the unique capability of daily revisit, its applications will have impacts to many aspects in disaster, environment, agriculture, forestry, education, and international cooperation.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-05-B1.4.02.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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