Nature

They have begun preparatory steps in Japan to produce LOTUSat-1 as part of the Natural Disaster and Climate Change Prevention project undertaken by the Vietnam National Space Center (VNSC), the Japan International Cooperation Agency said Thursday. The satellite will use a sensor that uses radio waves to observe the Earth, and thus functions independently of a light source. That means it can function 24x7, a clear advantage over satellites using optical sensors, which can only function in daylight. It could take 36 months to build LOTUSat-1, but the launch schedule has yet to be fixed since there are many factors to be considered, Vu Anh Tuan of the VNSC said. But he said that, typically, it takes six to 12 months for a satellite of this kind to be launched. Once the satellite is in orbit, it would cover the whole of Vietnam and help reduce damage caused by natural disasters by 10 percent, he said. The time it takes Vietnam to retrieve images of a specific location would also be reduced … [Read more...] about Vietnam, Japan building satellite for natural disaster prevention