Civil, Commercial, and International Remote Sensing Systems and Geoprocessing
David L. Glackin and Gerard R. Peltzer
Chapter 1: Civil, Commercial, and International Remote Sensing
1.1 Evolution of the Field: 1980–1997
1.1.1 Introduction
In the early 1980s, space-based remote sensing was characterized by governmental and military stand-alone systems of high complexity and expense. The field has evolved as the following events occurred.
- Hybrid government/commercial satellite programs were planned and launched (e.g., SPOT, Landsat, RADARSAT).
- Many new commercial systems were planned, and a few were launched (e.g., OrbView-1/Microlab-1, which was the first commercial weather satellite, and UoSAT-5, which was the first commercial microsatellite).
- Many new missions using satellites in the minisat category (100–500 kg) were planned, and two were launched (TOMS/Earth Probe and OrbView-2/SeaStar).
- Many new missions using satellites in the microsat category (10–100 kg) were planned, and five were launched, most based on a satellite bus from Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) in the United Kingdom.
- Various multiple-use systems were planned, for example, civilian and military polar-orbiting weather satellites in the United States.
- Governments began to purchase end-user data products, rather than satellite systems, from industry (e.g., NASA's approach to the OrbView-2/SeaStar ocean color program).
The move away from governmental and military stand-alone systems of high complexity and expense can be traced primarily to fiscal pressure. In both Europe and the United States, governments began to plan new programs in which they would develop and fly a remote sensing satellite that would then be taken over by a commercial company for operations (e.g., the European Space Agency's [ESA] Earth Watch program).
In the United States, the government initiated programs in which industry was expected to share a substantial portion of the development costs and to recoup their investment by developing a commercial market for the data products (e.g., NASA's New Millennium program [NMP], Earth System Science Pathfinder [ESSP], and LightSAR program). NASA also created the Earth Observation Commercialization Applications Program (EOCAP) to assist commercial companies in adapting remote sensing technology to the marketplace. One example of a program supported by EOCAP is the AstroVision program, which is designed to place an environmental satellite in geosynchronous orbit to provide color imagery to customers.
Finally, NASA began a practice, which may become more commonplace, of procuring data products rather than remote sensing hardware, and letting industry decide how to achieve that goal. The first example of this practice is the OrbView-2/SeaStar program, in which the SeaWiFS sensor is providing ocean color imagery, which can be used by the fishing industry to select potentially good fishing sites. Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) has been responsible for procuring, launching, and operating the system, and for providing the data to NASA.
The evolution of space-based remote sensing can also be traced, in part, to the end of the Cold War, to the accelerating international proliferation of remote sensing systems, and to the declassification of various kinds of remote sensing data. For example, the former Soviet Union announced the commercial availability of archival 5-m resolution Kosmos imagery in 1987, followed by 2-m resolution Kosmos imagery in 1992 (sold under the SPIN-2 trademark). The U.S. industry felt that the commercial availability of imagery with this resolution could be the harbinger of a lucrative market that could expand internationally. The industry felt that it would be excluded from this market because of existing U.S. restrictions on imagery resolution, and lobbied intensely to get the restrictions changed. In 1994, the first licenses were granted allowing commercial U.S. systems with a resolution of 1 m to be built and flown.
The number of countries capable of building free-flying remote sensing satellite systems from 1980 to 1997, and the capabilities of some countries that were already using these systems, grew substantially. For example, in the same year (1982) that a Thematic Mapper (TM) with 30-m multispectral imagery first flew on Landsat, the SPOT Image organization was created in France to market imagery from the first SPOT satellite. SPOT was launched in 1986 and provided 20-m multispectral and 10-m panchromatic imagery. In the following year, the former Soviet Union announced the availability of 5-m imagery, thus increasing the "resolution race." In 1980, there were five countries that were capable of building free-flying remote sensing satellite systems. By 1996, three more countries (Canada, China, and the United Kingdom) had joined this group. (It should be noted that by 1993, South Korea and Portugal also had their own remote sensing satellites. However, these were 50-kg microsatellites with limited capabilities, and these countries were not capable of building their own systems during this period. It should also be noted that Germany has built space-based remote sensing instruments for years, such as sensors that flew on the Shuttle and on the Mir space station, but Germany has yet to build its own satellite.)
The group of countries that will own, but not necessarily build, free-flying satellite systems is about to expand rapidly. Figure 1.1 shows the first relevant system to be owned by each country. (This information is abstracted from Table 1.7 in the appendix at the end of this chapter, which summarizes all relevant systems from 1980 to 2007.) Over half of the new countries, however, are using the technological expertise of other countries to build most of the hardware. In addition, they are using the foreign-partnership programs for technology transfer to build up an indigenous capability to make space-based remote sensing hardware, usually to complement their existing capability in analyzing remote sensing data.
Fig. 1.1. Remote sensing at the crossroads: countries fielding free-flying remote sensing satellite/sensor systems, 1980–2007. |
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