One of the four spacecraft of the DMC project, which is an organization for international space program cooperation formed by seven countries, namely United Kingdom, Algeria, China, Nigeria, Thailand, Vietnam and Turkey, BILSAT-1 was dedicated to studies on agriculture, forestry, hydrology, land cover/use and mapping, environment as well as urban area development.[5][6][7][8] It was built at a cost of $14 million.[9]
BILSAT-1 ended its mission in August 2006 due to battery cells failure.[6][11]
Payloads
Turkey's first indigenously developed scientific microsatellite for remote sensing, BILSAT-1 was based on an enhanced SSTL-100 satellite bus. The 130 kg (290 lb) satellite features a multi-spectral instrument called ÇOBAN, which is a low-resolution 8-channel camera. The name is an abbreviation for "ÇOk-BANtlı Kamera" for "Multi-Band Camera". It has two imaging sensors, a 4-band visible and near-infrared (VNIR) sensor at a resolution of 26 m (85 ft) and a high-resolution panchromatic sensor at 4 m (13 ft). The swath widths were 55 km (34 mi) for the VNIR and 25 km (16 mi) for the panchromatic sensor. The sensors had a 4-day repeat cycle.[4][6][7][12]
BILSAT-1 hosted a real time image compression module named GEZGIN, an abbreviation for "GErçek Zamanda Görüntü İşleyeN", which is a digital signal processor using JPEG 2000 algorithm to compress images taken by the satellite. Further payloads are on board propulsion, GPS navigation device, a GPS attitude receiver and a control moment gyroscope. BILSAT-1 also hosted new technologies such as high-capacity solid-state data recorders and star trackers.[7]
Launches are separated by dots ( • ), payloads by commas ( , ), multiple names for the same satellite by slashes ( / ). Crewed flights are underlined. Launch failures are marked with the † sign. Payloads deployed from other spacecraft are (enclosed in parentheses).