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While Earth observation applications were dominated by conventional large satellites in the past, rapid advancement in COTS technologies enables relatively smaller satellites to meet certain needs, limited but sufficient to some extent, with reasonably low investment. Ten years ago, the most of small satellites were developed to acquire necessary technologies, or to utilize them as space test beds to verify new technologies or components. However, recently launched small satellites start to draw attention from commercial companies who are considering the small satellites as adequate tools for their businesses. It is already demonstrated that a small satellite which weighs 200 ~ 300 kg is able to produce quality images with the spatial resolution of approximately 2 meters and soon expected to achieve 1 meter. Considering the unique advantage of satellite constellations in terms of revisit, it is anticipated that small satellite constellations would complement conventional ones in the next few years.

Multispectral Earth Imaging Satellite (MEISAT) is SaTReCi’s 100 kg micro satellite which will be adequate to support a high resolution multispectral Earth imaging camera. MEISAT, whose development is currently in progress, is capable of achieving a ground resolution of 8.5 meters with a 47 km swath width and 400 km scan length from its intended orbit of 730 km. The low-cost satellite is also capable of storing 8 Gbits of image data which will be transmitted to ground at 10 Mbps with an X-band transmitter. This paper provides an overview of MEISAT mission operation concept. The mission requirements and the system specifications are also discussed. The paper then describes the overall system configuration. The design of the command and data handling system, the power system, the attitude control system, the RF system, and the payload system is presented.