RASAT, Turkey's first national earth observation satellite, was designed and built entirely by Turkish engineers at TÜBİTAK UZAY facilities with financial resources provided by the Republic of Turkey Strategy and Budget Directorate. The RASAT satellite was launched on August 17, 2011 and started imaging operations in orbit. Although the design life of the RASAT Satellite was determined as 3 years, like other R&D satellites in this class, it completed 8 years in orbit on August 17, 2019. During this period, the RASAT Satellite has successfully achieved all its objectives and is still on duty at full capacity. The images obtained from the RASAT Satellite are used in cartography, disaster monitoring, agriculture, environment, urban planning and planning studies.
Over the course of 8 years, RASAT made 42529 orbits and imaged a total area of 15,383,700 km2. The RASAT Satellite has successfully performed 2838 imaging missions and has covered the whole of Turkey multiple times.
RASAT Satellite has a 7.5 m resolution electro-optical imaging system and the first national payloads BİLGE (Flight Computer), GEZGİN (Image Compression Unit) and X-Band Transmitter (100 Mbit/s image download).
On the other hand, within the scope of the "TÜBİTAK UZAY - Satellite Image Processing and Geoportal Creation Project" numbered 2013K120800, which was included in the 2013 investment program of the Republic of Turkey Strategy and Budget Directorate, GEZGİN Portal was developed to share the images obtained from observation satellites on the internet. Raw images downloaded from the RASAT satellite are transferred to the GEZGİN Portal after geometric and radiometric corrections and coordinatization processes. In 8 years, 11653 square images covering an area of 10,487,700 km2 from the RASAT satellite were transferred to the Gezgin Portal. All citizens of the Republic of Turkey can log in to the Gezgin Portal using their e-government passwords and download all images to their computers free of charge. As a matter of fact, since the day it was put into service, the Traveler Portal has been visited 223,710 times and 20,445 different users have been able to download and use a total of 24,993 square images.
As a result, the RASAT Satellite has more than met the needs of our country in the field of earth observation satellites, and more importantly, the experience and know-how gained by TÜBİTAK UZAY from this satellite have been transferred to subsequent projects, particularly GÖKTÜRK 2. Many new satellite system and subsystem development activities, which are currently being carried out with the İMECE and TÜRKSAT 6A Satellites, have been built on the RASAT experience.
