A German satellite carryinga cloud-piercing, night-vision radar was launched early Friday to create themost precise maps and imagery ever produced by a civilian space radar system.
Called TerraSAR-X, thecraft will spend the next five years circling the planet at an altitude ofabout 319 miles to gather vast volumes of data using a cutting edge X-bandradar system.
The mission's launch waspostponed several months after an earlier flight of the Dnepr rocket suffered amajor failure last year. The Dnepr, a converted ballistic missile from formerSoviet military arsenals, was grounded for about nine months while engineerswrestled with technical problems.
Managers at Kosmotras, theinternational firm in charge of marketing Dnepr launch services commercially,also had to convince Kazakh officials to allow Dnepr flights to resume from thecountry's territory.
TerraSAR-X will undergo atesting phase through this fall, during which ground controllers will validatethe health of the satellite's radar system. Officials expect to enter theoperational phase of the nearly $250 million mission by the end of the year.
The mission's cost is splitbetween the public and private sectors, including satellite-builder EADSAstrium, the imagery sales company Infoterra, and DLR, the German space agency.
TerraSAR-X's radar will becapable of imaging up to one million square kilometers, or almost 400,000square miles, of Earth's surface per day, according to a written statement fromthe mission partners.
The radar can also steerits radio pulses without maneuvering the spacecraft, which will allowscientists to gather data using three techniques. The methods include imagingthe Earth's surface in a fixed strip mode, scanning across the satellite'sground track, and continuously training radar beams on a specific area as thecraft flies overhead.
"This is decisive,especially in regions near the Equator which are often clouded," said WolfgangPitz, TerraSAR-X project manager at EADS Astrium.
"X-band technology hasalways been a German specialty," Pitz said last year. "In this field,we are at the leading edge worldwide."
"In the first year ofoperation, we will gain a lot of experience and encounter applications we donot even consider at the moment," said Jorg Herrmann, chief executiveofficer of Infoterra.
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