So ALOS/Daichi, NEC’s prototype spy satellite, went AWOL late last month with undisclosed (as yet, to me) electric problems that may or may not be connected to ADEOS-I and -II, IGS and DRTS… I say no more.

Some might say it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Japan as Daichi was providing data on several hundred kilometers of devastated Pacific coastal Tohoku coastline and ALOS-2/ Daichi-2 won’t be launched for another two years or so, according to JAXA.

ALOS/Daichi at work...

Here is the quick brief I put up on Space News/ Spacenews.com on the day of the announcement, also below, with some commentary to follow.

ALOS/Daichi has always presented a bit of an enigma to me. Sources told me back in the 1990s that there were ideas to take the Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) sensor by NEC to much higher resolution- to around 1-meter-  but that this was seen as politically difficult at the time. Had Japan done it, it would have been accused of building a spy satellite under the guise of scientific research.

…So resolution was left at 2.5 meters so as not to be accused of being dual-use, but also to provide an intermediate step toward militarily useful resolution. At the same time, its relatively high data storage and transmission capability and stability were also also seen as crucial steps towards building spy satellites.

NEC, like Melco, had its own plans for an operable-LEO based spy satellite constellation based on its small-medium bus system that has an interesting place in Japan’s space history. In a story that made front page news in Space News- contained the claim that the bus was aimed at Teledesic no less. The guy who made the claim, Takenori Yanase,  was just on the edge of the massive defense padding scandal that landed him and Hiroaki Shimayama on the the front page of the newspapers and then jail. I can still remember the NEC flack ringing me up and laughing down the phone- “Hey Paul, your buddies are on the front page of the Nikkei!”

Oh..and then quel surprise!

Within 10 days of the August 31, 1998 Taepodon Trigger, Ichiro Taniguchi was up before the Cabinet briefing them on Melco’s own spy satellite plans- which…required fitting modified PRISM sensors on them to achieve, albeit rather blurrily as it turned out, sort-of 1-meter resolution. :-)

And so what happened to NEC’s small/medium bus technology development for “Earth observation” satellites? The answer is…. ASNARO!