China Puts New High-resolution Satellite into Imagery Services

Опубликовано: 23 янв. 2017 г. China on Monday formally transferred its first Gaofen-3 high-resolution satellite from trial runs to imagery services. It now commands the highest resolution among microwave remote sensing satellites now in orbit. Launched into orbit in August last year, Gaofen-3 has been testing its C-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar imaging system which is capable of one-meter resolution. Imaging through microwaves has made it an all-weather satellite. The trial runs have checked and verified its various systems and functions, including Earth observation in scanning widths of between 10 kilometers and 650 kilometers with resolutions of between one meter and 500 meters. “During trial run in orbit, Gaofen-3 has provided various users with close to 40,000 images taken from 150 million square kilometers of ocean and land,“ said Tong Xudong, chief engineer for Gaofen Project. Apart from microwave, Gaofen-3 also has 11 other imaging modes which facilitate i