RapidEye Constellation
| RapidEye Constellation | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Type: | Five earth observation satellites |
| Country: |
 Germany
|
| COSPAR-ID : | 2008-040A through 2008-040E |
| Mission dates | |
| Dimensions: | 156 kg |
| Size: | 1 m × 1 m × 1 m |
| Begin: | August 29, 2008, 07:15 UTC |
| Starting place: | Baikonur |
| Launcher: | Dnepr |
| Status: | Out of service |
| Orbit data | |
| Rotation time : | 97 min |
| Track height: | 630 km |
| Orbit inclination : | 97.8 ° |
RapidEye Constellation is a network consisting of five earth observation satellites . They belonged to RapidEye AG, the first German private provider of geodata services. After the bankruptcy of RapidEye AG in 2011 and an economic consolidation, the company is now owned by Planet Labs Germany in Berlin , an offshoot of the US company Planet Labs . The satellites were in operation from 2009 to 2020.
development
The satellite system has been developed since 1996 by the Munich space company Kayser-Threde based on ideas from the DLR as a lead project for the commercialization of space travel and part of the new German space program. The British company Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) in Guildford (United Kingdom) manufactured the satellites. The cameras and sensors were developed and built by the German company Jena-Optronik GmbH in Jena . The satellites based on the MicroSat-100 satellite bus have a mass of around 156 kg and are designed for a service life of seven years. After a public competition, the satellites were named Tachys (fast), Mati (eye), Choma (earth), Choros (all) and Trocha (orbit).
The total project costs amounted to a total of 160 million euros. The DLR contributed financially with almost 15 million euros and the state of Brandenburg with 37 million euros.
Image capture and transmission
The optical system uses five line scanners to register multispectral images in the wavelength range from 440 nm to 850 nm: 440 - 510 nm (blue), 520 - 590 nm (green), 630 - 685 nm (red, together with the NIR channel detection of the NDVI ), 690 - 730 nm (red edge) and 760 - 850 nm (near infrared). The geometric resolution in each channel is 6.5 meters per pixel. With 12,000 pixels per line, the camera records a swath width of approx. 77 km. The maximum length of an image strip is 1500 km. Every day, 4 million square kilometers of the earth's surface can be recorded, of which 1500 square kilometers can be temporarily stored. The satellites can be adjusted so that they can photograph any point on earth within a day.
The ground station for satellite control is in Brandenburg an der Havel . The satellites are commanded by BlackBridge AG in Berlin. The image data are received from a satellite station on Spitzbergen in the North Atlantic. The data transfer rates are:
- 80 Mbps for image data ( X-band )
- 9.6 kbps for TT&C (downlink)
- 38.4 kbps TT&C (uplink)
Orbit
The five satellites were jointly launched into space on August 29, 2008 at 07:15 UTC by a Dnepr launcher from the Russian rocket launch site in Baikonur . They orbit the earth at an altitude of about 630 km on a common sun-synchronous orbit at approximately equal distances from one another. The equator overflight from north to south takes place at 11:00 a.m. local time.
use
Generally, every area of the world is overflown within less than five days. However, by swiveling the satellite transversely to the direction of flight, it is also possible to examine every point on earth every day, as long as the cloud cover there allows. This enables the recording of an area from different angles. Digital terrain models can be derived from the resulting stereoscopic recordings . High-resolution photos with a level of detail of five meters form the basis of topographic maps with a scale of 1: 25,000 . Multitemporal image data provide information about growth developments on arable land or enable field-accurate mapping of storm damage.
Web links
- Company Web site Planet Labs (English)
- Earth Observation Portal: RapidEye Earth Observation Constellation (English)
- DLR: RapidEye
- DLR: RapidEye satellite fleet delivers first images
Individual evidence
- ^ RapidEye constellation retirement . Press release in ESA's eoPortal, January 24, 2020.
- ↑ Historic RapidEye Constellation Captures Last Light . Planet Labs, April 2, 2020.
- ↑ Kayser-Threde: Company website ( memento of the original from October 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ RapidEye constellation launched successfully. (No longer available online.) Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, August 29, 2008, archived from the original on September 11, 2008 ; accessed on October 19, 2011 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.dlr.de/rd/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-2440/3586_read-5336
- ↑ http://www.pnn.de/brandenburg-berlin/452195/
