On-board Geo-database Management in Future Earth Observing Satellites

In order to let the end-users can directly downlink satellite imagery that they specify area of interest (AOI), One of key challenging technologies is how the on-board data distributor autonomously retrieves the imagery according to user’s command as well as simultaneously retrieves the other data sets, such as, temperature, moisture, geographic attribute data, e.g. street name, from other databases, which will be used for providing the user better visualization and understanding to the situation surrounding him/her, especially they are not familiar with the environment. This paper presents a whole new design of concept for on-board geo-data management system in future intelligent earth observing satellite system. The concept design is based on the idea of using satellite imagery, supported by geo-data database associated with attributes and DEM database, as data sources to describe the real world of AOI, where the users specifically query through uplink to satellite from ground. The query results will directly be downlinked to users with a form of geo-image-map. Thus, the new data model, data structure and database management system has to be designed and developed for this purpose. The designed data model is able to manage the huge data sets so that the raster satellite imagery and geo-database can better be queried, visualized, flexibly handled.