New incubator park lifts geographic satellite industry

Construction of Geographic Information Industry Incubation Park will be completed in Tangjiawan by the end of 2019, it was announced at a closed-door summit on Aug 10.

The 20,000-sq-m (4.94-acre) facility in Zhuhai Intelligent Industrial Park will be operated under a framework agreement between Orbita, Anhui University, and Zhuhai Hi-Tech Innovation & Entrepreneurship Service Center. A joint lab on satellite remote-sensing big data intelligent processing and intelligence analysis will also be built.

The incubator will utilize Orbita's edge in high-quality remote-sensing data, satellite coverage, and data services to attract upstream and downstream hi-tech enterprises to the sector, according to Jiang Xiaohua, executive deputy general manager of Orbita.

Moreover, another five Orbita satellites -- one video and four hyperspectral -- will be launched to join the growing "Zhuhai-1" micro-nano satellite constellation either by yearend or the first quarter of next year.

The constellation, a commercial data system developed by Zhuhai Orbita Aerospace Science & Technology for hyperspectral and video satellites, is to eventually contain 34 remote-sensing satellites. Seven are now in orbit, including two experimental units launched last June and five sent into orbit in April.

There are only about 20 hyperspectral satellites in the world, four of which were developed by Orbita. The comprehensive performance indexes of these satellites, including amplitude, spectral resolution, and calibration methods, are advanced by world standards.

Their spatial resolution, which is as high as 10 m (33 ft), represents the highest level in the country. Simply put, they can distinguish ground objects that are 10 m long and 10 m wide in the remote-sensing image.