PARIS - Taiwan’s space authorities say they plan to use their just-launched Rocsat-2 Earth observation satellite to reduce the nation’s dependence on other commercial remote-sensing spacecraft and to become a seller of satellite optical imagery.

Lou-Chuang Lee, director of Taiwan’s National Space Program Office (NSPO) and soon to become president of the National Applied Research Laboratories, an umbrella research organization that includes NSPO, said

Rocsat-2’s prime scientific mission will be supplemented by a commercial program to be managed by a company to be selected soon.

In a June 10 interview, Lee said NSPO "realizes that high-resolution imagery like this has a high demand now on the world market. So we will sell images worldwide. We have been waiting almost five years for this moment, and now we have top-quality pictures to show, and we can perhaps depend less on other nations’ satellites."

Rocsat-2 has an optical imager with a ground resolution of two meters, meaning it can distinguish objects such as trucks and ships. One of its key features is its ability to swivel up to 45 degrees off nadir in both pitch — forward and backward — and sideways roll positions, extending its potential viewing area on each orbit.

The satellite is equipped with a solid-state mass-memory recorder with 40 gigabytes of capacity and is able to send images to the main ground station in Hsin-Chu City at rates of 120 megabits per second, Lee said.

He said that despite Chinese mainland concerns that Rocsat-2 is a reconnaissance satellite as much as anything else, NSPO views it as a science and environmental mission.

Rocsat-2 was built by prime contractor EADS Astrium of France with substantial contributions from Taiwanese industry. The program is part of a long-term effort in Taiwan to develop an autonomous space capability.

The first program, covering from 1991 to 2006, includes the launch of Rocsat-1 in 1999 — which is still operational — and the planned six-satellite Rocsat-3 constellation scheduled for launch in 2005. Northrup Grumman Corp. (then TRW) — designed and built Rocsat-1, with a team of 28 Taiwanese engineers stationed at the California production plant to learn about satellite manufacturing. Five Rocsat-1 subsystems, including its on-board computer and solar panels, were built in Taiwan.

NSPO has joined with the non-profit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., for the development of Rocsat-3.

A second long-term program was approved in 2002 and continues through 2018. Missions include a broadband communications satellite, a Rocsat-2 successor and work on microsatellites, according to NSPO.

Launched May 20 aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. enhanced-version Taurus XL rocket, Rocsat-2 has produced its first images and is expected to become fully operational by September, said Guey-Shin Chang, head of ground systems at Taiwan’s National Space Policy Office in Taipei. The satellite is in a polar low Earth orbit at 981 kilometers in altitude.

David Chu, NSPO chief engineer, stressed the satellite’s science mission as its primary interest. Rocsat-2 will observe the relations between thunderclouds and the upper atmosphere, and in particular the "transient

luminous events" that produce large electromagnetic jets between the clouds and the ionosphere. Taiwanese scientists have observed these phenomena from the ground but no one has studied them from the top down, Chu said.