Remote Sensing Aircraft

Equipped with GPS navigation and POS systems, the remote sensing aircraft of the Center can perfectly conduct all-weather flight operations with a capacity of carrying aviation cameras, scanners, imaging spectrometers, imaging radar and other remote sensors. It could also carry a warehouse to collect samples of the atmosphere and acid rain.

The Airborne Remote Sensing Center has accumulatively undertaken hundreds of various remote sensing application projects. Besides, its remote sensing aircraft have fulfilled 6,000 sorties, covering a total area of more than 2,000,000 km2. These accomplishments have played a key role in national projects, integrated application experiments, natural disaster monitoring, remote sensing equipment improvement.

High-performance remote sensing aircraft

An aerial optical remote sensing image of Zhongguancun(Beijing), which was captured in August, 2009.

The Center sent two remote sensing airplanes to make overall and high-resolution surveys of the disastrous areas. With 227 accumulated hours of flying time in 41 sorties, the remote sensing survey carried out by the two aircraft covered about 23.7 thousand square kilometers, and produced 400 scenes of satellite data with a total volume of 150 GB. There once was a five-day survey which maintained two flights a day and made such a flight record that last 13.43 hours within one day. Furthermore, the Center executed a great many projects, including high-resolution SAR system application, on board SAR anti-interference experiment and National fundamental survey project--airborne high-resolution photography to Hainan province.

Two more advanced remote sensing aircraft will be introduced in four years. By integrating with over 10 types of high-performance remote sensing facilities, such as high-resolution linear arrays, area scan digital cameras and high-resolution polarization interferometer synthetic aperture radar, the new system will play a decisive role in China’s airborne earth observation system.