Taiwan’s Formosa Satellite 5, commonly called Formosat-5, has been providing satellite imagery to assist disaster relief work in Turkey following a deadly magnitude 7.8 earthquake on Monday last week, with its latest orbital rotation occurring yesterday.
The Taiwan Space Agency (TASA) on Saturday wrote on Facebook that its data and information processing team consolidated images taken by Formosat-5 alongside pictures from other satellites.
The improved imagery was provided to organizations such as Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction, TASA said.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Space Agency
Images were also provided to Sentinel Asia, a collaborative initiative among international space agencies and disaster management bodies, which requested Formosat-5 images just two hours after the earthquake.
Taiwan joined Sentinel Asia in 2010, and has since benefited from shared satellite images and reciprocated with images taken by domestic satellites.
TASA said the team compared Europe’s Sentinel-2 images of Turkey, taken on Jan. 25, with those taken by Formosat-5 on Thursday to conduct architectural analysis and pinpoint potential disaster sites such as toppled buildings, fallen trees and obstructive ground fissures, covering an area of about 187 hectares.
The comparative images also showed prospective sites for emergency shelters such as tents, TASA said.
The TASA team also adopted two sets of satellite radar images from Europe’s Sentinel-1 to compare the area before and after the earthquake, with initial estimates indicating that the tectonic plates on which Turkey sits shifted more than 69cm.
Formosat-5’s first set of images were taken on Tuesday last week, its first pass over Turkey after the quake. Unfortunately, the images that day could not be used due to bad weather.
The satellite’s next passes over Turkey were on Thursday and Saturday, when clear images were obtained.
TASA said that images yesterday were to focus on specific areas where aftershocks added to the damage.
The satellite is to stay on course to examine Turkey tomorrow and Friday for its next two passes over the country.
Formosat-5 has taken more than 64,000 images since it was launched in 2017, TASA said.
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