A year in orbit for Deimos-1 and UK-DMC2
This evening SSTL will celebrate the first anniversary of the Earth observation satellites Deimos-1 and UK-DMC2 that were launched in July last year onboard a Dnepr rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The two satellites were quickly commissioned and joined the Disaster Monitoring Constellation to deliver their first images in August just a week after launch.
Deimos-1 was the first Earth Observation satellite built by SSTL for Spanish company Deimos Imaging, who have been capturing fantastic imagery of the world during the year. The following image and many more can be viewed in their online gallery.
The whole island of Cyprus, image taken 7th August 2009. Credit: Deimos Imaging
It has also been an eventful year for the SSTL's own UK-DMC2 satellite, which captured images of the Forest Fires in California and more recently the spread of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Slick last month. SSTL's subsidiary DMCii has been putting the higher resolution imagery and capacity of UK-DMC2 to good use in a broad variety of campaigns for precision agriculture, deforestation and land use planning. The image below shows intensive irrigation in arid Libyan farmland.
Al Jawf, Al Kufrah (الكفرة), Libya (ليبيا). UK-DMC2 Image (C) DMCii, 2010.
