Vietnam to launch first remote sensing satellite into orbit

Vietnam will launch the first remote sensing satellite, VNREDSat-1, into orbit on May 4 from the Kourou launch pad, Guyana, France, reported the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) on its website, quoting sources from the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology as saying. Specifically, the VNREDSat-1 Project has a total investment of 55.8 million EUR (73.3 million U.S. dollars) in preferential Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) of the French government and 64,820 million VND (3.1 million U.S. dollars) in corresponding capital from Vietnam. The VNREDSat-1 was designed and consulted by Astrium SAS Company under the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company ( EADS), experts in producing satellites of France. Once completed, Vietnam will be able to provide high resolution satellite images to ministries, agencies, provinces and cities that have demand to use remote sensing satellite images, bringing practical effectiveness for socio-economic development, coping with natural disasters and climate change. VNREDSat-1 project is a coordination, making the best use of the available infrastructure of the system to receive, store and process images of remote sensing satellites of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, creating a complete and independent supervising system from the satellite to ground- receiving station and the center for processing and distributing remote sensing image data in Vietnam. It is an optical earth-observation satellite capable of capturing images on all areas on the earth's surface. Its mission is to take photos in PAN and four MS bands, with a revisit time of three days. The spatial resolution is 2.5 meters (PAN) and 10 meters (MS). Its platform is 600mm x 570mm x 500mm. It has total mass of about 120 kilograms. The designed life-time is five years.