On May 31st, the Centre organized the 6th technical visit to the Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd. (21AT). Participants from 2017 MASTA&DOCSTA Program attended this visit and gave high praise to it. Here is one journal article from Mr. MD. REJAUN NABI, a 2017 MASTA participant in RS&GIS from Bangladesh.

The Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd. (21AT) was founded in June 2001 in Beijing. It was the first independent commercial satellite operator and non-governmental investor in remote sensing satellite system in China. It is also the first private company that vertically integrated EO satellite operator and services businesses. It owns several low cost EO small satellites, including the 1m optical EO small satellite constellation, and the satellite control & image tasking and receiving stations. Now there are more than 600 employees working in this organization in various post. For the past 16+ years, it provided Triple Sat constellation satellite imagery basis services in the world and still going on.

We, participants of 2017 MASTA & DOCSTA program, had the great opportunity to visit this company as a part of our technical visit on May 31st, 2018. Upon our arrival, Mr. He Jianjun gave the welcoming speech. Then, Ms. Zhang Nannan gave us a brief introduction of the company. After that, we went to the data and system demonstration office to see their activities.

In brief introduction parts, Ms. Zhang Nannan discussed about the basic information of the company, Beijing Series Satellites and Products and Services. The business scopes of this company are RS satellite operation, RS data acquisition and process, software system R&D, RS application service and spatial info integration services. She showed us Beijing Series Satellites like Beijing-1 and TripleSat (DMC3/BJ-II) constellation. She also described about the ground stations of Triplesat the company had, such as the ones in UK, in Singapore and Beijing HQ. TripleSat constellation collected 286, 346 scenes globally between 2016-2018. She also described about Imagery comparison between TripleSat constellation and Spot. She told us how to collect data and Interpretation processing systems. Additionally, she talked about online service portal systems of TripleSat constellation and how we could get this imagery and payment systems.

This Company is capable to provide products and services for the entire space geo-information value chain from satellite procurement/financing, satellite housekeeping, payload & satellite resources management, tasking, data acquisition, image processing, hosting/archiving, data management/distribution, multiple satellite source integration through its web portal, sophisticated geo-information services, to application software development and integrated solutions.

The application services of this company covers a large range of customers, including government customers, Industry customers and institutes & colleges. This company involves more than 140 industry departments and there are more than 400 projects now. It is a pioneering and leading enterprise in providing national, regional and global “Dynamic Information Management System”. It has obtained extensive experiences in providing successful services for the customers from more than 43 countries and regions. These services cover many applications including land resources management, eco-environment monitoring and urban planning. Other applications of this company are Disaster monitoring, Environment, Land, Agricultural, Forestry, Ocean, Surveying and Communication sectors.

The main target of this company is to establish global presence and further expand sales and service channels in order to bring the benefits of unique products and services to world.

In my opinion, technical visit is very important for the students, because it offers the practical experience of observing the new technology, applications and developed world. Through this visit, I learned some new technology and utilization which would certainly become an advantage for my upcoming days.