Achievement and prospect of satellite remote sensing technology in China

In China, one kind of remote sensing satellite development and applied at the very beginning is film-recovery photographic satellite. The camera systems of these satellites had been developed in two generations and three classes. Altogether China had successfully launched seventeen recoverable remote sensing satellites. Since 1980's, Chinese aerospace establishment has developed two types of meteorological satellites. In later 1998, ZY-1 earth-resource observation satellite, which is developed cooperatively by China and Brazil, is going to be launched into space. Chinese Academy of Space Technology (CAST), Beijing Institute of Space Machine and Electricity (BISME), and Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics (SITP), are the major space technology research establishments of China in providing remote sensing satellite platform and it's payload. The presentation describes a survey of earth observation satellite and it's payload instrument in China, and gives a picture to the future Chinese satellite remote sensing technology.