On August 29, Russia's federal space agency announced that five satellites, which will be operated under contract by German company RapidEye AG, were launched by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited of Britain. The cluster, carried by a converted Dnepr rocket during its launch at the Russian space center in Kazakistan, is aimed at providing accurate geographical data to various companies.

Insurance and food companies, farmers, governments and other agencies and institutions worldwide will benefit from the satellites’ mission to enable monitoring of the Earth’s surface. The quintet can image any area in the world at all latitudes between plus or minus 75 degrees within only one day and give out, in five days’ time, a complete data set for the agricultural land of North America and Europe, RIA Novosti informs.

The spacecraft bus was designed and built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited in Guilford, United Kingdom. The company also designed the spacecraft control center and performed the spacecraft assembly, integration and test.

As for the imaging payloads, they were designed and built by MDA subcontractor Jena-Optronik GmbH of Jena, Germany. The prime contractor of the RapidEye mission, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Limited, is the one responsible for the mission and  spacecraft design, the ground planning and image processing system, while the Canadian Commercial Corporation will be the company acting as the contracting agency between MDA and RapidEye AG.

According to RapidEye, the multi-spectral push broom style imager onboard each satellite will image the Earth in five spectral bands, scanning a 78 km lane at 6.5 m resolution.