The project marks the first achievement of a 25-year collaborative joint venture company formed between SSTL & Tsinghua University which was inaugurated by the UK Space Minister Lord Sainsbury and witnessed by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair during their respective visits to Beijing in 1998. Tsinghua University in Beijing is renown as one of China's foremost universities.

Ten engineers and scientists from Tsinghua University have spent 12 months during 1998-99 at the Surrey Space Centre -- working alongside SSTL engineers on the design, construction and test of the advanced microsat.

Currently, a combined SSTL/Tsinghua team are at the Plesetsk cosmodrome completing final preparations of the satellite prior to integration onto the Nadezhda COSPAS-SARSAT satellite and the COSMOS launcher.

Tsinghua-1 will form the first demonstrator for the Disaster Monitoring Constellation and carries multi-spectral Earth imaging cameras providing 39-metre nadir ground resolution in 3 spectral bands.

The Disaster Monitoring Constellation, being lead by Surrey for launch in early 2002, will comprise five microsats able to provide daily world-wide high resolution imaging for the monitoring and mitigation of natural and man-made disasters.

The Chinese Tsinghua-1 satellite will also carry out research in low Earth orbit using digital store-and-forward communications, a digital signal processing (DSP) experiment, a Surrey-built GPS space receiver and a new 3-axis microsat attitude control experiment.

SSTL's space GPS receiver (SGR-10) is a spacecraft orbit/attitude determination subsystem specifically designed for small satellite operations.

Tsinghua-1 will make use of the SGR-10, with 12 channels and equipped with two receive antennas, to investigate the use of GPS signals in microsat on-board attitude as well as orbit determination.

Tsinghua-1 will utilize three reaction wheels to provide full 3-axis agility on a microsat platform. This design is based upon 3-axis control systems flown successfully on SSTL's UoSAT-12 minisatellite in 1999 and will be the first demonstration of its use on SSTL's standard microsat platform.