China Builds Satellite That Can Take High-Resolution Images of US Cities in Seconds
rising concerns in the US that China's space technology is growing at a breakneck pace.
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Chinese scientists have revealed their new satellite can quickly snap high-resolution images of American cities, which are so detailed they can identify individual military vehicles and weapons.
The commercial Beijing-3 satellite conducted an in-depth scan of a 1,470 square-mile area in San Francisco Bay.
The area was captured by the satellite in 42 seconds, The South China Morning Post reported.
According to The Insider: Beijing-3 has a unique advantage up its sleeve: It can pitch and yaw at up to 10 degrees per second while not compromising image quality as it orbits the Earth, said lead scientist Yang Fang, who headed the project run by DFH Satellite Company under the Chinese Academy of Space and Technology.
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Normally, satellite cameras have to be kept still when they take high-definition images and thus can only observe straight strips of land as they orbit above the area.
So they sometimes have to fly over a region multiple times to scan the whole area or work in tandem with other satellites.
🇨🇳#China's Beijing-3 satellite rotates 10°/sec, taking images at 50 cm/pixel while wildly rolling & yawing, allowing better overall performance than US competitors though not as sharp {30 cm/pixel}
— Devi Rhamesz (@ChrliesWarchest) December 27, 2021
Response time is 2-3 times faster than WorldView-4, US' most advanced observation pic.twitter.com/iHOC0MU8Vr
The Beijing-3's maneuverability means it only needs a single sweep to observe entire regions, such as the 3,915 mile Yangtze River, the longest river in Asia, which winds from China's east coast to the western Tibetan plateau, the researchers said in a CCTV-13 broadcast segment.
If the Beijing-3 is equipped with artificial intelligence, it can potentially observe up to 500 areas around the world with up to 100 revisits a day, they added, The Post reported.
Still, the quality of the Beijing-3's imagery isn't sharp enough to rival American-developed satellites, such as the Worldview-4, which was built by Lockheed Martin and could capture images at a resolution of 12 inches per pixel.
Beijing-3 can snap images with a resolution of 20 inches per pixel at best.
But its researchers said the Chinese satellite's response time is around two to three times faster than that of Worldview-4 — which was retired in 2019, less than three years after its 2016 launch, because of a failure in its stabilizing system.
The report on Beijing-3 comes amid rising concerns in the US that China's space technology is growing at a breakneck pace.
Gen. David Thompson, the vice chief of space operations in the US Space Force, said earlier this month that China could overtake the US in space capabilities by 2030.
"The fact, that in essence, on average, they are building and fielding and updating their space capabilities at twice the rate we are means that very soon if we don't start accelerating our development and delivery capabilities, they will exceed us," Thompson said, CNN reported.
As Eurasiontimes reported:
Taking high-resolution pictures from space is a very challenging task as attitude control devices can induce vibrations that blur photographs. Due to this technical constraint, most Earth observation satellites must be steady when capturing images.
According to Yang, Beijing-3 is the most nimble satellite and could be one of the most powerful Earth observation satellites ever created, despite its tiny size and low cost.
