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Arirang-2 to Monitor North Korea
(Korea Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) By Kim Tae-gyu
South Korea's multi-purpose satellite Arirang-2, which is scheduled to lift off this Friday in Russia, will be able to keep a closer watch on North Korea's missile launch preparations and other military activities.
The Korea Aerospace Research Institute on Sunday said the multi-spectral camera (MCS) aboard the Arirang-2 satellite, which weighs 900 kg, is capable of identifying an object that is 1 meter in diameter.
``If the North sets all to launch a missile at an open-air site, we will be able to take pictures both color, and black and white through the high-tech camera-embedded Arirang-2 and digitally transfer the photos to the ground virtually on real-time basis,'' said Choi Hae-jin, director at the state-backed institute.
``With Arirang-1, we could not identify even trucks shipping missiles due to low definition of photos taken by it. But the Arirang-2-incorporated MSC has about 45 times better resolution than its predecessor,'' he said.
The MSC at Arirang-2 captures imageries at a 1-meter resolution, which means it can identify a moving vehicle whether it is a truck or a passenger car at an altitude of 685 kilometers above the ground.
The one-meter resolution camera, which recognizes one-square-meter space on the ground as a dot, is the top-line product even at the international standard.
Just a handful of nations such as the United States, Russia, France, Japan and Israel currently retain satellites with such precision cameras.
In comparison, Arirang-1 holds a 6.6-meter-resolution camera that identifies 43.56-square-meter space on the ground as a dot.
Due to such mediocre airborne surveillance capacity of Arirang-1, South Korea suffered setbacks in predicting the North's test fires of seven missiles early this month.
However, Choi flatly rebuffed recent allegations reported by local newspapers that Arirang-2 is a quasi-military satellite because it can go down to a lower altitude to take better surveillance pictures in an emergency.
``It is an erroneous idea as Arirang-2 will be permanently placed on a 685-km orbit by a Russian rocket. It carries 72-kilograms of fuel, which is not enough to enable it to go down to lower orbit even once,'' Choi said.
``Basically, Arirang-2 is not a military satellite but a remote-sensing device for such purposes as geographical updates, natural resource searches and environmental observation,'' he said.
On top of Arirang-2, which will take off shortly after 4 p.m. (Korea time), Korea will put a pair of satellites in orbit this summer to increasing the nation's total to 11.
The first will be a private satellite Hausat-1, a small box-like one that will be sent into orbit tomorrow from a launching pad in Kazakhstan.
Researchers at Hankuk Aviation University created the one-kilogram miniature satellite with minimal budgets aimed at helping students understand the process of building satellites.
The other is a communications satellite, dubbed Mugunghwa-5, a satellite developed by KT, Korea's pre-dominant fixed-line telecom operator.
The nation's fourth commercial satellite will be launched late next month from a vessel in high seas south of Hawaii.
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