The MOSAIC programme (Micro Satellite Application in Collaboration) is a small satellite programme launched by the British National Space Centre in 2000. The scheme offers support to three UK small satellite projects.
One of these projects is the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), sponsored by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). Every year natural and man-made disasters result in devastation around the world, causing loss of life, human suffering and huge economic losses. Although there are satellites currently observing the Earth they are not always best suited to monitor these events. The images from such satellites can be infrequent, and sometimes delivery of critical images can take months. These images are also expensive to generate as the instruments are designed to meet many different user requirements. SSTL and its partners have proposed a network of five micro satellites to provide images on a daily basis, DMC will offer an affordable solution to the problem of disaster assessment and monitoring from space.
On 28 November 2002 the first of DMC’s micro-satellites, AISAT-1 was successfully launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Northern Russia. AISAT-1 was built for SSTL’s Algerian customer CNTS, and is the first Algerian satellite ever to be launched. DMC will also be the first ever micro-satellite constellation to be dedicated to disaster monitoring. It encompasses the latest in small satellite technology and just a single satellite is capable of imaging the same area anywhere in the world at least every four days. The remaining four satellites are due to be sent into orbit in the middle of 2003.
