China Remote Sensing satellite ground station and its research and development
Wang Xinmin
China Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station
P.O. Box 2434, Beijing, China
Abstract
The status, research and development of the China Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station are described in the paper.
Introduction
It has been more three years since the operation of the China Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station in December, 1986. Since then the Station has been running smoothly. It has acquired approximately 30,000 scenes of TM data, processed more than 2000 scenes, archived more than 2000 master films and provided a larger amount of TM data product to the remote sensing community.
The station consists of two divisions: the operation division and the research and development division. The former is responsibility for receiving, processing, archiving and distribution of satellite data and renders services to the user's community, while the latter is to develop image processing system and technologies and to conduct signature and information content studies of the satellite data, pilot application studies for certain projects and also monitoring of natural disasters.
General status of the operation division
The operation division has three parts: receiving station, digital processing laboratory and photolab.
The main responsibilities of the receiving station are acquisition and tracking of the satellite and receiving and recording of the satellite data onto HDDT. It is equipped with a 10 m. antenna and X/S land tracking and receiving equipment. It can cover approximately 855 of our Land territory and can receiving data from Landsat and SPOT. At present only Landsat TM data re received on routine basis. After adding some relevant demodulating equipment, it can be used for data reception from other remote sensing satellite, including Chinese satellite to be launched in 1994.
The main functions of digital processing laboratory are ingesting HDDR data, decommutation and framing, PCD extraction processing, radiometric and geometric, generation of digital products and latent film transparencies. The main equipment consists of HDDR, frame synchronizer, processing subsystem with two VAX 11/780 And AP 180 V array processors and a stand alone film generation subsystem with VAX 11/750 and two B/W and color fire 240 film writers. Besides, there are four IIS terminals for QL, quality assessment and image analysis application the production capability is more than either 44 MSS scenes or 4 TM scenes per 12 hours. A cluster has been purchased to cluster 4 VAX 11/780 and VAX 11/750 together and a new VAX 6400 machine and array processors will be added to meet the processing requirements of other remote sensing satellite data.
The photolab is equipped with all necessary B/W and color film and paper processors, photocolor composite and enlarging machines and all kinds of quality control and assurance instruments. The ordinary products are WRS framed after systematically corrected data. The radiometrically corrected with line shift alignment AA data and geodetically corrected PG data, etc., are produced under user's request.
