First locally developed satellite invaluable in helping to monitor environmental change
Jermyn Chow Straits Times 22 Apr 12;
One year in space, and Singapore's first locally designed and built satellite has not only captured images of Sumatra's forest fires and the Bangkok floods, but also had a few near misses with floating debris.
Since last May, X-Sat, which hovers 800km above ground, has taken and beamed back more than 1,000 satellite images from space to help researchers on the ground monitor the effects of environmental changes.
Associate Professor Low Kay Soon, one of X-Sat's team leaders, said the National Environment Agency and environmental consultancy Sentinel Asia have benefited from X-Sat's images.
The red-and-black photographs - with red denoting vegetation and black representing bodies of water - can be used to measure soil erosion, sea pollution and environmental changes within an area of 50km by 30km.
The 105kg fridge-size microsatellite has also had seven close shaves with space debris - mostly remnants of satellites that have been decommissioned or fragments chipped off from other satellites.
The most recent encounter was on April 13, when the solar-powered X-Sat, which circles the Earth once in 100 minutes at a speed of 7.5km a second, came as close as 200m to one of the fragments.
'It is harrowing because even debris the size of a five-cent coin can inflict a lot of damage on the satellite,' said Prof Low.
The success in beaming back images to Singapore capped more than nine years of work by more than 40 scientists and engineers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore's defence research body, DSO National Laboratories.
The experience so far has been invaluable for Prof Low and his team who run NTU's Satellite Research Centre.
Lessons learnt will be applied to Singapore's second locally made satellite - but the first to be made by students - scheduled to be launched next April.
Called Velox-I, the nanosatellite is smaller than the X-Sat and is being put through its paces by NTU engineering students in the Undergraduate Satellite Programme that began in April 2010.
NTU hopes to launch four smaller satellites in the next 10 years.
