According to reports, a small Chinese satellite captured images of a broad region around a US city in 42 seconds that are detailed enough to identify a military vehicle and the type of weapon it might be carrying.
Beijing-3, a small one-ton commercial satellite launched by China in June, completed an in-depth examination of the core area of San Francisco Bay (3,800 square kilometres or 1,470 square miles), according to scientists participating in the investigation.
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Since attitude control devices can induce vibrations that blur photographs, most Earth observation satellites must be steady when capturing images. However, during this experiment, the Beijing-3 yawed rapidly, changing the angle of its camera’s line of sight to the ground while flying over North America. The mobility enabled it to cover a broader region than satellites had previously.
The photograph was captured from a height of 500 kilometres (310 miles) and had a resolution of 50 centimetres per pixel. The satellite’s performance test revealed that it could collect imagery while twisting at up to 10 degrees per second, a pace never seen on a satellite before.
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“China started relatively late on agile satellite technology, but achieved a large number of breakthroughs in a short period of time,” said project lead scientist Yang Fang and her colleagues of the DFH Satellite Company, writing in a paper published in the journal Spacecraft Engineering.
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“The level of our technology has reached a world-leading position.”
Despite its reasonable size and inexpensive cost, Beijing-3 was regarded as the most manoeuvrable spacecraft and could be one of the most powerful Earth observation satellites ever built, according to Yang.