RazakSAT’s Mission
The RazakSAT mission is to ensure the availability of satellite imaging for any part of Malaysia in order to fulfill the requirements of the local remote sensing user community. Malaysia has been dependent on remote sensing satellite imagery provided by other Satellite Operating Agencies (SOAs) that have been constrained by cloud and timeliness. To alleviate those constraints, RazakSAT will be uniquely placed in a Low Earth Near Equatorial Orbit (NEqO).
RazakSAT’s Orbit
At a nominal altitude of 685 km and 9° inclination orbit, it will provide an optimal number of 14 passes a day over Malaysia thereby increasing its imaging opportunity by over 3 times compared to a satellite orbiting the Earth in the more popular Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO). The NEqO enables RazakSAT to provide higher imaging opportunity for Malaysia and other countries that are situated in the near equatorial belt of 9° North and South of the Equator.
RazakSAT’s Payload
RazakSAT will carry the Medium-sized Aperture Camera (MAC) which is an electro-optical payload of a pushbroom type with 5 linear detectors (1 panchromatic, 4 multispectral). RazakSAT offers a Panchromatic band (510 – 730 nm) and 4 Multispectral Bands: Band 1: Blue (450 – 520 nm); Band 2: Green (520 – 600 nm); Band 3: Red (630 – 690 nm) and Band 4: Near-Infrared (760 – 890 nm). The spatial resolution of 2.5 m and 5 m for Panchromatic and Multispectral, respectively, covers a swath width of 20 km at the 685 km nominal altitude. Data is being quantized into 8 bits of 256 brightness values to represent information.
Source:
M.Y. Norhan and H. Norhizam, “The Role of RazakSAT in Remote Sensing” GIS Development Magazine, Jun 2006, pp.26.
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