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Applications of ROCSAT-2 Images in
Daily Monitoring
An-Ming Wu, Frank Wu
National
Space Program Office
8F, 9 Prosperity 1st
Road, Science Park, Hsinchu, Taiwan
Email: amwu@nspo.org.tw,
fwu@nspo.org.tw
Ching-Jyh Shieh
National
Science Council
19F, 106 Hoping East Road,
Taipei, Taiwan
Email: cshieh@nsc.gov.tw
AbstractROCSAT-2
satellite has been launched at UTC 2004.5.20
17:47, and is currently operated on a 14 rev/day
circular Sun-synchronous orbit with 891 km
altitude and 99.1 deg inclination. The local
solar time of descending node is 9:22 a.m.. The
satellite carries the remote sensing instrument
(RSI) for the main mission to daily image over
Taiwan and the surrounding areas.
RSI
will provide images for 2 m ground sampling
distance (GSD) in panchromatic band and 8 m GSD
in four multispectral bands. ROCSAT-2 will also
daily revisit some areas worldwide during the
5-year mission lifetime, and will help for the
observation of daily variation phenomena
including disaster evaluation, environment
monitoring, and vegetation investigation.
RSI utilizes the agility of the
satellite bus for stereo imaging over a specific
region, continuous imaging over a slender
region, and mosaic imaging over a large region.
The imaging capability is 8 minutes per orbit,
and the imaging areas during one cycle can be
one 3000 km x 24 km continuous strip, two 100 km
x 24 km stereo pairs, four 100 km x 24 km
strips, or eight scenes. The image processing
system (IPS) has been implemented to handle
imaging scheduling, data ingestion, data
processing, and data management. According to
the requests by the users, IPS performs the
imaging scheduling and informs the mission
control center to upload commands and download
the telemetries. The signals are ingested and
transformed to the image raw data, which are
then processed with radiometric and geometric
corrections. Finally, the image products can be
printed, archived, queried, and assessed by the
users through internet. The whole process can be
accomplished in 2 hours for the emergency
operation.
Since RSI powered on and
began to take images on June 4, 2004, ROCSAT-2
has completely imaged over Taiwan in two months.
Some areas are imaged continuously and even
dynamically monitored. Examples include disaster
areas, harbors, and airports. ROCSAT-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.
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