Like Taiwan and Thailand, South Korea has had to seek help from foreign countries to achieve its long standing wish to acquire an independent high resolution space imaging capability, especially given the continuous threats to the country from North Korea. Initially the Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) - which has led this effort - sought help from various American companies to build and launch its KOMPSAT-1 satellite in 1999. Like India with its similar IRS-1C and IRS-1D satellites, the KOMPSAT-1 images with their 7 m GSD were found to he inadequate for intel­ligen­ce gathering purposes. Thus the new KOMPSAT-2 satellite, launched into a Sun-synchronous orbit in July 2006, has an image specification - l m pan and 4 m multispectral imagery with a 15 km swath width - similar to that of IKONOS [Fig. 4 (a)]. The satellite itself has been constructed in close collaboration with EADS Astrium in France, while the pushbroom scanner has been built by ElOp in Israel. The actual launch was carried out from the Plesetsk site in Northern Russia by Eurockot, the joint venture of EADS Astrium of Germany and the Russian Khrunichev organisation. This used the Rockot launch vehicle which is based on the Russian SS-19 ballistic missile. The main ground receiving station for the KOMPSAT-2 images is located at the KARI facility in Daejeon. Regarding the actual use of the KOMPSAT-2 imagery, military spokesmen have made clear that its main use is to monitor military installations and nuclear plants in North Korea. The analysis of the images is carried out both by the National Intel­ligence Service (NIS), a civilian agency equivalent to the American CIA, and the Korean Defense Intelligence Agency (KDIA), the central agency for military intelligence. Close cooperation with the United States in the area of geospatial intelligence is carried out by the Combined Intelligence Operation Center (CIOC) which also analyzes the imagery collected in overflights by U-2 aircraft - a matter of constant complaint by the North Korean government, which claimed recently that over 300 overflights had been made by U-2 aircraft during 2006. Obviously with the advent of the KOMPSAT-2 satellite, South Korea is no longer quite so dependent on U.S. supplied imagery and intel­ligence as it has been in the past. This included the IKONOS imagery supplied through Space Imaging's partner company in South Korea, Space Imaging Asia, a subsidiary of the Hyundai automobile, aircraft and ship construction company. Originally this company had its own ground receiving station and processing facility in South Korea. However this now appears to have closed and has disappeared from the new GeoEye company's list of regional partners. While the distribution of KOMPSAT-2 imagery over Korea, the United States and the Middle East will remain under Korean control, the distribution for the rest of the world is being undertaken by SPOT Image [Fig. 4 (b), (c)]. This parallels the arrangement that the French company has negotiated for the Formosat-2 and THEOS satellites discussed above. It is also worth noting that, since September 2003, a ground station located in Taejon operated by the ‘Agency for Defense Development’ has been able to receive imagery from the SPOT satellites directly, giving South Korean intelligence agencies yet another source of high-resolution imagery.

Malaysia

This is yet another country in the region that has decided to enter the field of high resolution imaging from space for intel­ligence gathering for ‘national security purposes’. In 2005, the Malaysian Center for Remote Sensing (MACRES) opened a new ground receiving station at Temerloh in Pahang which receives data directly from the SPOT satellites. However Malaysia intends to supplement this source of imagery by launching its own national satellite called RazakSAT. This is being built for Astronautic Technology (an agency of the Malaysian government) by the SaTReC Initiative company in South Korea [Fig. 5]. The satellite will carry a pushbroom scanner equipped with five linear arrays. One of these will produce pan imagery with a 2.5 m GSD over a 20 km swath width; the remaining four will generate multi-spectral (RGB + NIR) images with the same swath width. The unique aspect of RazakSAT is that it will be placed in a near equatorial orbit inclined at 9˚ to the Equator, instead of the near polar orbit that is standard for most remote sensing satellites. This means that Malaysia -which is located between 1˚ and 9˚ latitude north - will be overflown on several occasions each day. This will give more opportunities for the satellite to acquire imagery of the terrain in what is a very cloudy area with few gaps in the cloud cover. The launch of RazakSAT is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2007 using the American Space X company's new low-cost Falcon launcher from its launch site in the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific. The satellite will be controlled from a new ground station located at Banting in Selangor within Malaysia.

Japan

In many ways, Japan has pursued a similar path to that of India. Initially, on the one hand, it developed its powerful H-IIA launcher; on the other hand, it developed and operated medium-resolution satellites that were used for earth resources and oceanographic applications. Then, in 1998, rather

like India with its Kashmir incursion, it received a huge shock with the launch of ballistic missiles by North Korea that overflew Japan and landed in the North Pacific. Following the outcry about the lack of warning of this event, the Japanese government decided to build a constellation of ‘Information Gathe­ring Satellites’ (IGS). Yet again, for political reasons, these satellites were said to be for ‘scientific research’ and ‘disaster monitoring’ - yet not a single image has ever been shown publicly. There is no doubt that, from the outset, they were designed to be reconnaissance satellites. The first two satellites in the constellation - IGS-1a (with an optical imager) and IGS-1b (with a SAR imager) - were launched together in March 2003 [Fig. 6]. The attempt, in November 2003, to place the next two satel­lites in the constellation - IGS-2a (optical) and IGS-2b (SAR) - into orbit failed due to a fault in the launcher. Quite a time gap then ensued before replacement satellites could be built. Furthermore the Japanese authorities also decided that the two replacement satellites should be launched separately so that both would not be lost if the launcher malfunctioned. After considerable delay, the replacement optical satellite, IGS-3a, was launched success­fully in September 2006. The replacement SAR satellite, IGS-3b, has just been placed successfully into orbit on 24th February 2007. It was launched in tandem with an experimental optical satellite, thought to be carrying an imager with an improved ground resolution for test purposes before being incorporated into the next generation of IGS satellites.

The more civilian oriented ALOS (Advanced Land Observing Satellite) was launched successfully by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in January 2006. The payload of this heavy (4 ton) satellite includes the PRISM high-resolution imager [Fig. 7 (a)]. This is a three-line pushbroom scanner with the forward and backward pointing telescopes producing their pan images with 2.5 m GSD and a 35 km swath at ±24˚ to the nadir. In many ways, it is quite similar to the HRS stereo-scanner mounted on SPOT-5 with an emphasis on the production of DEMs - though the PRISM and the Indian Cartosat-1 imager both have a smaller GSD than the HRS. Only a relatively small number of sample images from the PRISM imager have appeared so far, but they include several striking examples [Fig. 7 (b)].

Returning to the IGS high resolution imagery, according to reports in the Japanese press, the IGS optical satellites produce images with a GSD of l m, while the IGS radar satellites produce SAR images with 3 m GSD. Besides the IGS images, Japanese intelligence agencies are reported to be heavy buyers of IKONOS and QuickBird images ever since these two satellites came into service in 1999 and 2001 respectively. While the QuickBird imagery comes from the U.S.A., the IKONOS imagery is acquired locally by the ground station of Japan Space Imaging (JSI), owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation - which was a partner in the original Space Imaging company. In its drive to acquire high resolution imagery for geospatial intelligence purposes, Japan also became a Satellite Operating Partner (SOP) of ImageSat International, tasking and receiving high-resolution imagery from the EROS satellites from a ground station located at the Hiroshima Institute of Technology. Finally the ImageONE company has a direct receiving ground station at Yoni that receives images from the SPOT satellites. Regarding the actual use of the large variety and volume of space imagery that is being acquired for geospatial intelligence purposes, it is important to note that the Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF) come under the control of the civilian Japan Defense Agency, which is part of the Office of the Prime Minister. This arrangement is part of a deliberate policy under the Japanese Constitution to ensure civilian control of the armed forces. In line with this policy, Japan's central intelligence agency is the Cabinet Intelligence & Research Office, the so-called Naicho, which again is a part of the Office of the Prime Minister. According to various reports, the actual interpretation and analysis of the space imagery is carried out by the Cabinet Satellite Intelligence Center (CSIC). Again this reports directly to the Prime Minister's Office. Within the actual military Self Defense Forces (SDF), the main coordinating body for military intel­ligence is the Defense Intelligence Head­quarters (DIH). This has an Imagery Division that carries out the interpretation of space imagery for purely military intel­ligence purposes.