
25 April 2007, 9:22am
This image of the Mississippi Delta was captured by TopSat, a micro-satellite built and operated by a QinetiQ-led consortium of British firms. The Mississippi Delta is a region of cotton, rice and sugar farming that has played an important role in the social and cultural heritage of the southern United States. According to popular US legend the Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.
TopSat is a micro-satellite system that provides high resolution imaging of the Earth quickly and at low cost. The satellite is designed to return its data directly to a mobile ground station immediately after collecting an image, allowing far more timely delivery of the information which it collects than standard satellites. The system is specifically designed to meet operational timescales, whether for disaster relief, news-gathering, or other applications where speed of response is vital.
The UK consortium behind TopSat was formed and is led by QinetiQ, an international defence and security technology company who own the satellite and are responsible for day-to-day operations. It also includes CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory who designed and built the camera, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) who built the spacecraft bus and Infoterra who are responsible for data exploitation. The programme, originally funded by the British National Space Centre (BNSC) and the UK Ministry of Defence, is now a commercial venture.
Qinetiq
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Each month we select a hot topic and a leading figure in the industry to write about it.How valuable are our efforts on SDIs if we don’t actively address the human issues? Think about all the government regulations, technical implementation plans, internal processes and procedures, data sharing networks and so on. These are arguably meaningless if there is no buy-in or understanding from the people who must deliver against them.
During the 1Spatial Conference 2008 where there was a large number of presentations on a wide range of important industry topics ranging from data quality, data integration and data maintenance to open source and INSPIRE. But there were very few presentations that focused on the human aspects of our business.… More…
Steven Ramage
Contributor