The world's first remote sensing satellite designed for health research, carried by a Smart Dragon-3 carrier rocket, was launched from the waters near the city of Haiyang in Shandong Province on Tuesday.

The remote satellite is developed by the Medical Remote Sensing Information Institute of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University. The research institute was established in April 2022 in Wuhan, capital city of Hubei Province.

The designed payload of the remote satellite is about 60 kilograms. Equipped with visible light hyperspectral camera and ultraviolet camera, the satellite has hyperspectral, low-light, and ultraviolet modes.

It will detect environmental factors that affect human health in mainly China and then in neighboring countries, serving infectious disease traceability, endemic disease analysis, health and longevity factor monitoring, post-disaster epidemic prevention and control, public disease prevention and other fields.

Among the nine social service applications of remote sensing defined by the Group on Earth Observations(GEO), there is currently only a lack of dedicated remote sensing satellites for monitoring health and environmental factors.

A multi-sensor payload satellite platform will help detect and design payloads and select bands for the "water-soil-air" environmental elements that affect human health, so as to improve remote sensing monitoring capabilities in the field of global health research. It will also combine health, population and environment data to carry out demonstrations of medical remote sensing applications. 

Editor: Nie Yang