TopSat

TopSat is a micro-satellite designed and built by a QinetiQ-led consortium of British firms. Images from the satellite are provided free of charge to relief agencies responding to disasters anywhere in world.

TopSat was designed and built by a consortium of British companies led by QinetiQ, whose role included systems design and technical authority, provision of payload electronics units, project and operations management and data reception. Other consortium members are Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) designed and Infoterra.

The satellite is designed to return its data directly to a mobile ground station immediately after collecting an image, allowing far more timely delivery of the information which it collects than standard satellites. The system is specifically designed to meet operational timescales, whether for disaster relief, news-gathering, or other applications where speed of response is vital.

TopSat received the Aviation and Space Grand Award – the top award for aerospace technology, from Popular Science, the best selling science and technology magazine in the world. The magazine’s editors concluded that TopSat is an innovation that has the potential to change satellite and space reconnaissance technology.

TopSat weighs just 120 kg, but carries an optical camera capable of delivering panchromatic images with a spatial resolution at nadir of 2.8 metres covering a 17x17 km area, and simultaneous three-band multi-spectral images, (red, green, blue), with a resolution of 5.6 metres. This is thought to represent the best resolution per mass of any satellite launched to date. This camera is integrated with an agile micro-satellite platform to permit pitch compensation manoeuvres, allowing imaging of low illumination scenes.

TopSat has been in operation since its launch from Plesetsk in Russia on 27th October 2005. The satellite can be reprogrammed in orbit, and the consortium is exploiting this to enhance its performance. In addition to actively pursuing experiments for the MOD and BNSC, the consortium is also seeking new applications to which the technology can be applied. In the future, a constellation of three or four TopSat satellites could image almost any point on the Earth at least once a day, further opening up the potential for quick response imagery which is extremely cost effective to deliver.