RapidEye announced that they have 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 for the People’s Republic of China, was coordinated through their Chinese distributor Beijing Earth Observation.
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.
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.
Now that the RapidEye Level 1B imagery has been delivered, it is up to the Ministry of Land Resources to piece all of the tiles together to create a mosaic. The MLR has several potential uses for the imagery.
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