SSTL’s privately funded UK-DMC-2 has today passed its Test Readiness Review (TRR) at its Manufacturing Integration and Test Facilities in Guildford, United Kingdom. Scheduled for build completion in September 2008, the new Earth Observation (EO) satellite will provide higher performance imaging capabilities to the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) which is operated by SSTL’s subsidiary DMCii. UK-DMC-2 will carry an enhanced version of the DMC camera, which will provide 600-km wide, multi-spectral images of the Earth at a ground resolution of 22-meters. This is an advance on the current 32-meter DMC imager, which has been successfully providing imagery in support of deforestation, disaster relief and agricultural monitoring for over five years in the current constellation of five spacecraft. In addition to the increased resolution payload, SSTL’s new DMC spacecraft offers greater on-board storage and faster downlinks to provide more information, more quickly to the user. By operating with DMCii’s international groundstation network, the new DMC spacecraft offers up to 10x the capacity for data retrieval compared to the 1G DMC satellites. Spanish firm Deimos Imaging is also taking advantage of these new capabilities in Deimos-1, which is being built concurrently in the UK. The satellite’s large swath will allow Deimos-1 to undertake a double full coverage of Spain and Portugal every week, and a full coverage of Europe every 10 days—Guildford, United Kingdom
UK-DMC-2 EO Satellite On Track For Build Completion
SSTL’s privately funded UK-DMC-2 has today passed its Test Readiness Review (TRR) at its Manufacturing Integration and Test Facilities in Guildford, United Kingdom. Scheduled for build completion in September 2008, the new Earth Observation (EO) satellite will provide higher performance imaging capabilities to the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) which is operated by SSTL’s subsidiary DMCii. UK-DMC-2 will carry an enhanced version of the DMC camera, which will provide 600-km wide, multi-spectral images of the Earth at a ground resolution of 22-meters. This is an advance on the current 32-meter DMC imager, which has been successfully providing imagery in support of deforestation, disaster relief and agricultural monitoring for over five years in the current constellation of five spacecraft. In addition to the increased resolution payload, SSTL’s new DMC spacecraft offers greater on-board storage and faster downlinks to provide more information, more quickly to the user. By operating with DMCii’s international groundstation network, the new DMC spacecraft offers up to 10x the capacity for data retrieval compared to the 1G DMC satellites. Spanish firm Deimos Imaging is also taking advantage of these new capabilities in Deimos-1, which is being built concurrently in the UK. The satellite’s large swath will allow Deimos-1 to undertake a double full coverage of Spain and Portugal every week, and a full coverage of Europe every 10 days—Guildford, United Kingdom
