Integrated Mission Planning for FORMOSAT-2 Imaging Satellite and FORMOSAT-3 Meteorological Constellation

Paper number

IAC-06-B1.6.09

Author

Dr. An-Ming Wu, National Space Organization, Taiwan, China

Year

2006

Abstract

FORMOSAT-2 imaging satellite was launched on May 20, 2004, and it has taken images for important area over the world, especially for the southern Asia earthquake and tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, the Hurricane Katrina in the southeastern United States on Aug. 29, 2005, and the Pakistan earthquake on Oct. 8, 2005. The satellite has the agility of +/-45 deg for along-track and cross-track viewing, and provides images with resolutions of 2 m in panchromatic band and 8 m in multispectral bands and swath of 24 km. With the capabilities of daily revisit and large coverage of the satellite, its applications surely have impacts to many aspects including disaster investigation, environment monitoring, and vegetation evaluation.

FORMOSAT-3 meteorological constellation, also known as COSMIC (Constellation Observing Systems for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate), will deploy in April 2006 six microsatellites equipped with GPS receivers in low Earth orbits to collect the GPS signal as passing through the atmosphere. The six satellites will be placed on one orbit in a single launch. With each satellite carrying propellant to raise itself to different altitudes, a constellation with global coverage will be achieved after 13 months due to different orbital precession rates. The microsatellites receive the GPS signal, and the refractivity of the signal occulted by the atmosphere is utilized to retrieve the temperature, pressure, and water vapor of the atmosphere for weather forecast.

With the cluster of the FORMOSAT-3 microsatellites in the early phase, their measurement data will help in the prediction of path of typhoon and distribution of heavy rainfall, which frequently cause landslide disasters. During those events, the difficulty of FORMOSAT-2 imaging after disasters is due to the unpredictability of weather. Therefore, the prediction from FORMOSAT-3 dense data for typhoons and heavy rains will be in time fed into the mission planning to increase the efficiency of rescues. On the other hand, the high-resolution images from FORMOSAT-2 targeting the typhoon eyes will help to study the structure of circulation. In this paper the results of the intense observation period are demonstrated. The concepts of both missions integrated into the global observation systems are also proposed.

Abstract document

IAC-06-B1.6.09.pdf

Manuscript document

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