According to the statement made by the Ministry of Industry and Technology, the 11th anniversary celebration ceremony was held for RASAT at the TUBITAK UZAY Campus. The ceremony was attended by Minister of Industry and Technology Mustafa Varank, President of TUBITAK Prof. Dr. Hasan Mandal, TÜBİTAK UZAY Institute Director Mesut Gökten and the staff of the Institute attended.
In his speech at the ceremony, Varank said that RASAT is a first for Türkiye and is an indicator of effort and effort.
Emphasizing that the satellite reveals the capabilities of the Turkish people, Varank said, “RASAT is the most concrete example of the struggle to make Türkiye fully independent. We are also experiencing an example of how skilled and capable Turkish engineers, technicians and scientists are. The product, which was designed to have a lifespan of 3 years, served our country for 11 years. This satellite was used to solve the problems of our citizens, and it functioned at very sensitive points related to our national security. This is an indication of how high the capabilities of our people are.” said.
“Our wedding will be with ‘IMECE’ and ‘TÜRKSAT 6A'”
Noting the importance of making an effort in the field of space for Türkiye to be a fully independent country that can implement its own national policy, Varank said that TÜBİTAK UZAY is the flag bearer of this in the country and will continue to do so.
Expressing in a humorous language that the ceremony held for RASAT was in a sense a “funeral ceremony”, Varank said:
“The upcoming IMECE Project, the TÜRKSAT 6A Project, will be our weddings. Hopefully, let’s do these weddings with IMECE 6A, let’s bring great pride to our country, and fulfill the needs of our army, security forces and intelligence agency. For our children, our grandchildren and the future of this country, we need to work harder and continue these works hastily but decisively. May our success in RASAT be permanent, I congratulate all our friends who contributed.”
TÜBİTAK President Mandal stated that he had a conversation with TÜBİTAK UZAY employees who took part in different processes in the RASAT Project in the program organized and said, “We want to experience the excitement they experienced for RASAT in 2011 for İMECE and TÜRKSAT 6A next year.” made its assessment.
Viewed an area of 12 million square kilometers
RASAT, which was sent into space with the Denepr launch vehicle from Russia’s Yasny Launch Base on August 17, 2011, successfully landed in its target orbit at an altitude of 687 kilometers from the Earth, 969 seconds after the launch.
A total of 22,203 communications have been established with RASAT, which has made 58,726 orbits to date. Approximately 3 thousand 284 images were taken by RASAT’s camera with 7.5 meters of PAN and 15 meters of RGB resolution, and a total of 13 thousand 362 images were recorded.
A very large satellite image archive was brought to the country by providing an image of an area of 12 million 25 thousand 800 square kilometers with the satellite, which has a frame image size of 30×30 kilometers and can take 33 frames, that is, 960 kilometers long strip images at once.
The images taken by RASAT can be accessed from GEZGİN.
After the obtained raw images were processed, they were made available for urban and regional planning, forestry, agriculture, disaster management and similar purposes. In addition, these were transferred to the Real Time Image Processing (GEZGİN) Portal. Citizens of the Republic of Türkiye can access all archive images taken from www.gezgin.gov.tr with their e-Government passwords free of charge.
Space history was brought to domestic and national equipment
The first electro-optical earth observation satellite was launched into space with the successful completion of the BİLSAT Satellite, which was realized as a technology transfer project at TÜBİTAK UZAY in 2003. RASAT, the first earth observation satellite developed in 2004-2011 with the experience gained from the BİLSAT Project, was produced locally with a design life of 3 years. During the commissioning phase, a temporary ground station in Norway was used, in addition to Ankara, for the purpose of uploading the necessary software to RASAT, testing the satellite and downloading the images to be captured.
The High Performance Flight Computer (BİLGE), X-Band Transmitter and GEZGİN equipment designed, manufactured and tested by TÜBİTAK UZAY and ground station software were successfully used in the RASAT Project, gaining space history. Thus, TÜBİTAK UZAY has become the only institution in the country to reach Technology Readiness Level 9 in the field of space, by demonstrating its competence not only at the system level but also within the scope of subsystems.
Thanks to the infrastructure, knowledge, trained human resources and experience acquired with the RASAT satellite, the GÖKTÜRK-2 Project was launched.
GÖKTÜRK-2 satellite was developed by adding new subsystems to the subsystems that gained space history in RASAT. These two satellite projects, carried out nationally and locally, have made great contributions to the awareness of the country in the field of space and paved the way for new satellite projects.
Source gdhdigital
