Rapid Eye has successfully completed a contract to image 7.8 Million km² of the country of China ahead of schedule. The contract between RapidEye and the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) for the People's Republic of China, was coordinated through their Chinese distributor Beijing Earth Observation (BEO).
“What the Ministry wanted was an ambitious task. They wanted 80% of China, almost 8 Million square kilometers, with less than 10% cloud cover in a six month time window. I don't think we even realized whenwe signed how challenging it would be,” remarked Massimilliano Vitale, Head of RapidEye's Operations Department. “When you look at the statistical cloud cover for this area, over half of it rides at about 70%.Finding the right pass to get a relatively cloud-free image is often done quite by chance.”
Of course, with a project of this magnitude, nothing can be left to chance. This was a big contract, and as RapidEye is a relatively new imagery provider without a similar past experience, a lot was riding on this project. Commercial operations began for RapidEye just 13 months ago, following the successful launch of their satellite constellation in August, 2008.
“We have been using remote sensing for the last 10 years, and each year we have imaged parts of China.With such a large land mass, we have never been able to get the entire country imaged over one year. RapidEye has really been able to succeed here where other companies in the past have not,” stated Jihong Yang, Director of The Ministry of Land and Resources P.R.C.
The RapidEye system is able to return to any point on Earth daily. Over the past few months, the satellites could be repeatedly found over China. In order to insure successful delivery to the Chinese MLR, China was the focus when the satellites had any 'spare time'. As a result of this approach, most areas of the country were imaged five, and in some cases six times in order to fulfill the contractual requirements.
Written by Rapid Eye.
