Space

PoSAT - Portugal and Earth Observation Systems

Portugal's first satellite, PoSAT-1, was launched on 26 September 1993, as a piggyback payload on an Ariane LEO mission. Built by the UK's University of Surrey on a SSTL microsatellite bus, PoSAT-1 was inserted into an orbit of 793 km by 806 km at an inclination of 98.7 degrees. One of the central payloads on this 50-kg multi-mission satellite was the Earth Imaging System, consisting of "two CCD imagers, two lenses, and a Transputer Data Processing Experiment to provide on-board image processing and data compression" (Reference 634). The two different imagers permitted a wide-field capability with 2-km resolution or a narrow-field capability with 200-m resolution. Within a few months the small spacecraft had already returned more than 100 images of the Earth (References 634-636).