A carrier rocket launched from waters off east China’s Shandong Province Wednesday has sent two hyperspectral satellites into orbit, which are expected to support high-precision observation in China and large-scale monitoring of land and sea worldwide.
The Smart Dragon-3 (SD-3) carrier rocket blasted off at 10:38 a.m. (Beijing Time) near the city of Haiyang, delivering the Oriental Smart Eye (OSE) hyperspectral satellites 01 and 02 into planned orbit. The offshore mission was conducted by the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center.
Weighing around 300 kg each, the satellites each carry a hyperspectral imager featuring 22 calibrated spectral bands, a spatial resolution of 5 meters and an imaging swath of 300 km. Together, the pair is designed to provide global revisit coverage every five days, according to the developer.
The two OSE satellites can not only capture images but also interpret what they observe.
Unlike conventional optical imaging, hyperspectral observation records a detailed spectrum for each image pixel. These “spectral fingerprints” can help distinguish materials and measure properties, including vegetation chlorophyll and moisture, water quality, soil organic matter and mineral composition.
The satellites also carry onboard artificial intelligence computing modules with computing capacity of up to 400 trillion operations per second.
Such computing power effectively moves part of the AI inference normally performed on the ground into orbit. The satellites can therefore process what they observe in space, shifting from merely transmitting images to delivering usable results. According to the developer, each satellite has computing power roughly equivalent to that of 20 high-performance laptops.
The modules are designed to perform in-orbit processing, including anomaly detection, surface-feature identification, intelligent compression and feature extraction, instead of transmitting all raw imagery to the ground for processing. This could reduce the amount of data to be downlinked and shorten the time for delivering usable information from days to minutes.
Satellite 01, part of a space cooperation project between China and Indonesia, is expected to help safeguard agricultural production in Indonesia by precisely tracking crop growth and assessing disaster risks, according to the developer.
Satellite 02, part of a space cooperation project between China and Uzbekistan, is designed to support the landlocked country’s full-cycle monitoring of cotton cultivation from sowing to harvesting.
Once in operation, the pair will work with a separate high-resolution satellite already in orbit to form a system combining broad-area surveys with detailed observations.
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