Japan IGS

Japan has 2 IGS satellites in orbit which were built by Mitsubishi Electric. They are in a 490km orbit inclined at 97°. The satellites are used for civilian natural disaster monitoring.

	This image shows IGS-A which was launched on 28th March 2003. There are few details of the satellite on the web, but various sources say it has has an optical imaging system which can probably achieve about 1m resolution or 0.42 arcsec at 490km and weighs about 850kg. The resolution of 0.42arcsec implies that the instrument on this satellite must have a diameter of about 0.33m. The image scale here is about 0.13arcsec/pixel. The satellite measures about 35 pixels across or 4.5arcsec. This equates to 11.6m at 534km.
	This image is a screen shot from the ISS simulator. To produce it I made a simple VRML model of the satellite and put it in the XVV flight mode associated with the Station. Clearly there is a good match in panel angles.
	A great image of IGS1B which neatly captures the blue colour of the solar panels. IGS-B was launched on 29th November 2003. It has synthetic aperture radar with a probable resolution of 3m and weighs 1200kg.
	Artists impressions of IGS-B (top) and IGS-A

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