VNREDSat-1 (short for Vietnam Natural Resources, Environment and Disaster Monitoring Satellite, also VNREDSat-1A) is the first optical Earth Observing satellite of

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

; its primary mission is to monitor and study the

effects of climate change The effects of climate change impact the physical environment, ecosystems and human societies. The environmental effects of climate change are broad and far-reaching. They affect the water cycle, oceans, sea and land ice (glaciers), sea level ...

, predict and take measures to prevent natural disasters, and optimise the management of Vietnam's natural resources.

Satellite

The ''VNREDSat-1'' was built in Toulouse by

EADS Astrium Astrium was an aerospace manufacturer subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) that provided civil and military space systems and services from 2006 to 2013. In 2012, Astrium had a turnover of €5.8 billion and 18 ...

. During the project 15 Vietnamese engineers were integrated and trained by the Astrium team. The VNREDSat-1 system is based on the Astrium operational AstroSat100 satellite, used for the SSOT programme developed with Chile or the ALSAT-2 satellite system developed with Algeria. The 120 kg satellite will image at 2.5 m in panchromatic mode and 10 m in multi-spectral mode (four bands) with a 17.5 km swath, and will orbit at 600–700 km in a sun synchronous orbit.

Launch

The satellite was launched from ELV at the

Guiana Space Centre The Guiana Space Centre (french: links=no, Centre spatial guyanais; CSG), also called Europe's Spaceport, is a European spaceport to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana, a region of France in South America. Kourou is located approximatel ...

by the

Vega Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It has the Bayer designation α Lyrae, which is Latinised to Alpha Lyrae and abbreviated Alpha Lyr or α Lyr. This star is relatively close at only from the Sun, an ...

VV02 rocket at 02:06:31 UTC on 7 May 2013 together with the

PROBA-V PROBA-V, or PROBA-Vegetation (the ''V'' standing for ''vegetation'' and not the Roman numeral for ''5''), is a satellite in the European Space Agency's PROBA series. It was launched in 2013 with a predicted usable lifetime between 2.5 and 5 yea ...

and

ESTCube-1 ESTCube-1 is the first Estonian satellite and first satellite in the world to attempt to use an electric solar wind sail (E-sail). It was launched on 7 May 2013 aboard Vega VV02 carrier rocket and successfully deployed into orbit. The CubeSa ...

satellites.

References

2013 in Vietnam Spacecraft launched in 2013 Earth imaging satellites Satellites of Vietnam Spacecraft launched by Vega rockets {{spacecraft-stub