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Diwata-2 marks 4th year in space, captures over 100K images

Philippines | National

Diwata-2 marks 4th year in space, captures over 100K images

By Luisa K. Cabato

The country's microsatellite, Diwata-2, marked its 4th year in space on Saturday, Oct. 29.

Philippine Space Agency

"Since 2018, the second 50-kilogram Earth observation microsatellite of the Philippines has captured over 112,049 images around the world and covered 94.03% or 282,088 kmÂ² of the Philippine landmass," the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) reported.

The images that Diwata-2 captured were utilized for environmental monitoring as well as with disaster response management, PhilSA added.

"These images feature the onboard payloads, High Precision Telescope (HPT), Spaceborne Multispectral Imager (SMI), Enhanced Resolution Camera (ERC), and Wide Field Camera (WFC) capturing various scenery from reefs and islands to the monitoring of weather disturbances like typhoons," the agency said.

Philippine Space Agency

Diwata-2 will complete its 5th and final mission in 2023 and will orbit the Earth at 7.560 kilometers per second (km/s) at 602.8 km altitude.

PhilSA said that it is also expected to photograph the remaining 5.97 percent of the Philippines' land mass.

The satellite was built by researchers from the University of the Philippines Diliman and the Advanced Science and Technology Institute of the Department of Science and Technology together with Tohoku University and Hokkaido University in Japan under the Philippine Scientific Earth Observation Microsatellite Program.

"It was successfully deployed into 600 km sun-synchronous orbit (SSO orbit) on 29 October 2018 and carries optical cameras for scientific Earth observation," PhilSA said.

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