ELOP 'Small Sats' Promise Military-Level Imaging
for Commercial Customers

Israel's ELOP Electro Optics Industries has joined the burgeoning small satellite market with a proposal for a constellation of highly capable survey and surveillance satellites.

The EROS (Earth Remote Observation Satellites) system comprises an array of eight multi-spectral and panchromatic imaging satellites, placed in low-altitude orbit at between 480 and 600 km. ELOP proposes to have EROS in service as early as 2005. ELOP says EROS will be capable of mapping entire countries and goes on to say that it is suitable for agricultural and environmental monitoring, land use survey and town planning.

But ELOP also states that that the eight EROS satellites would allow "daily revisit times to most points on the planet," a feature of far more interest to military users. At peak performance the EROS system will offer images of up to one-meter resolution-an imaging capability once the exclusive preserve of a handful of hugely expensive military systems but now becoming increasingly available on the commercial market. ELOP says it expects considerable interest in the EROS system from customers in the Asian region and elsewhere.

ELOP has several other low-cost, high-performance satellite systems on show at Asian Aerospace. These include the ERMS (Earth Resources Monitoring Sensor) and the MSRS (Multi-Spectral Remote-sensing Space camera). ERMS is capable of imaging 100-km swatch or ground at a resolution of 16 meters, from an altitude of 400 km. ERMS currently uses a panchromatic sensor but a multi-spectral imager is being developed for a future upgrade. ERMS great advantage is its small size, weighing in at just 6.5 kg.

MSRS is a multi-spectral remote-sensing camera designed to be fitted to the David earth resources monitoring satellite. The MSRS can provide 12 simultaneous overlapping images across the visible and near-IR spectral regions, with a 5-m ground resolution. The Davis satellite is an Israeli-German a joint venture satellite development project aimed specifically at the narrowband remote sensing market.