FORMOSAT-2 quick imaging

The FORMOSAT-2 satellite was launched in 2004 on a Sun-synchronous orbit of 14 revolutions per day. To support the aftermath relief and precaution of secondary disasters, in many cases FORMOSAT-2 was the first to take images through continuously monitoring over the world after many large events. The daily repeat of FORMOSAT-2 simplifies operations, scheduling, and processing, and makes it easy for the users to request images for urgent requirements. With a higher orbital altitude of 888 km and a larger field of regard of 45 deg, the satellite can even take images up to the geographic poles. This demonstrates that FORMOSAT-2 is the only high-resolution imaging satellite, which can daily cover the global areas. Moreover, due to higher altitude, only seven orbital maintenances have been conducted during its mission time. Furthermore, its good agility guarantees large-area imaging and multiple tasking. The imaged area over the last 10 years is around seven times of the global land area. However, FORMOSAT-2 has not yet completely covered the entire global land for three major reasons: its poor resolution near the borders of the 14 strips of the coverage, lack of imaging requests over rare population areas, and frequent imaging needs for urgent disaster reliefs and management efforts. The satellite is currently in a good status of health while investigating the trending data of each subsystem, including Remote Sensing Instrument (RSI), Communications and Data Handling (C&DH), Telemetry, Tracking and Control (TT&C), Power, Thermal, Propulsion, Attitude and Orbit Control Systems (AOCS), and FSW. With excellent system performance and teamwork, it is expected to make more contributions in its extended mission life.