Belarus, Russia team up for new satellite constellation

Belarus and Russia plan to create a new constellation of satellites that will boast the image resolution of one meter. The information was released by Piotr Vityaz, head of the administration of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, on 9 April, BelTA has learned.

The new satellites will be able to take pictures from the outer space with the resolution of one meter to satisfy the demand of the countries for highly detailed imagery. The leaders of Belarus and Russia are now discussing the possibility of launching such satellites.

Apart from that, the existing satellite constellation that makes up the Belarusian-Russian integrated space system for live monitoring of the Earth will be expanded. At present it includes the Belarusian satellite BKA, the Russian satellite Canopus-B and the ground-based infrastructure. Thanks to that the potential output of space images for each member state has been doubled, the reliability of fulfilling applications for images has been improved, opportunities for sharing the best practices and for training specialists have been expanded.

In the future the existing satellite constellation will gain one Belarusian satellite and two Russian ones. The economic analysis of the project has been prepared.

Belarus launched its own satellite on 22 July 2012. By doing so, Belarus became a space power and later created the Belarusian space system for the remote sensing of the Earth. The system comprises the satellite and the ground-based control center.

Over 20 research and manufacturing organizations of Belarus (divisions of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, the State Defense Industries Committee, and the Education Ministry) now carry out the bulk of the work in the area of space research. Components, instruments and systems used to make space equipment are manufactured in Belarus.