The Disaster Monitoring Constellation for International Imaging ( DMCii ) or just Disaster Monitoring Constellation ( DMC ) consists of a number of remote sensing satellites constructed by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) and operated for the Algerian, Nigerian, Turkish, British and Chinese governments by DMC International Imaging . The DMC provides emergency Earth imaging for disaster relief under the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters , which the DMC formally joined in November 2005. Other DMC Earth imagery is used for a variety of civil applications by a variety of governments. Spare available imaging capacity is sold under contract.
6-776: UK-DMC or UK-DMC 1 , also known as BNSCSAT-1 , was a British satellite that formed part of the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC). It was built by Surrey Satellite Technology , who operated it via DMC International Imaging on behalf of the British National Space Centre and later the UK Space Agency . It was launched alongside other DMC satellites on 27 September 2003, and retired from service in November 2011. As well as carrying remote sensing imaging sensors,
12-608: The responsiveness that is needed for emergencies and for disaster support, with images provided across the Internet from the responsive satellite and a member country's ground station within a day or less of a request being made. The DMC has monitored the effects and aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami (December 2004), Hurricane Katrina (August 2005), and many other floods, fires and disasters. The Sun-synchronous orbits of these satellites are coordinated so that
18-609: The satellite also carries experimental payloads: the CLEO Cisco router in Low Earth Orbit , an experiment demonstrating GNSS reflectometry , and a water resistojet propulsion system . The UK-DMC demonstrated the first use of the Interplanetary Internet in space. In November 2010, nearing the end of its operational life, UK-DMC was placed into a lower orbit. After 8 years in orbit, daily operations of
24-769: The satellite ceased in November 2011. Operations have been taken over by the satellite's successor, UK-DMC 2 . The satellite is now a part of the growing space junk in Low Earth Orbit , which will decay in the Earth's atmosphere sometime in the future. This article about one or more spacecraft of the United Kingdom is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Disaster Monitoring Constellation The DMC provides far larger areas of imagery than, but at comparable resolution to, established government imaging satellites such as Landsat . DMC imagery
30-578: The satellites follow each other around an orbital plane, ascending north over the Equator at 10:15 am local time (and 10:30 am local time for Beijing-1). Some of these satellites also include other imaging payloads and experimental payloads: onboard hardware-based image compression (on BilSAT), a GPS reflectometry experiment and onboard Internet router (on the UK-DMC satellite). The DMC satellites are notable for communicating with their ground stations using
36-458: Was deliberately designed to be comparable to Landsat imagery, in order to leverage the expertise and software of the large established remote sensing community used to working with Landsat images. Imagery can be provided far more rapidly from the DMC than from Landsat, thanks to having multiple similar satellites in orbit ready to cross over a point of interest, and the larger images produced. This brings
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