• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.385-417
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• 2017

Insurances of space activities are divided into satellite insurance, astronaut insurance and third party liability insurance. Against the background of the rapid development of space commercialization, especially the increasing participation of private entities in space affairs, the present international and domestic mechanisms of space insurance are challenged. As a space-faring state which is in the process of developing space businesses, the regulations of space insurance in China are deserved to be discussed. Satellites insurance is at present well-developed, the "pre-launch", "launch" and "in-orbit" phases of satellites are all possible to be insured by related companies. China created the CAIA in 1997 to provide insurance for Chinese satellites. However, with more private entities start to involve in space as well as satellite industry, the regime established under the framework of CAIA is necessary to be modified, and the mechanism relating to space insurance brokers should be promoted. The astronauts are recognized as the envoy of humankind, and relevant international regulations are made to provide assistance to them in emergency circumstances. From the domestic perspective, astronauts will be fully insured. China creates a particular type of insurance for astronauts. However, once space tourism becomes a business, the insurance of the tourist will be demanded to be created. In order to promote China's space tourism, it is recommended to take the "Astronaut Group Insurance" as an optional model to space tourists, if the tourists are customers of a governmental-owned space company. Once private involvement of providing orbital/suborbital tourism service becomes a reality, new rules are required. Getting a third party liability insurance is deemed as an indispensable precondition for an applicant to get a launch permission. Domestic space laws will include provisions for the third party liability insurance. China's "Interim Measures" of 2002 realizes the importance of third party liability insurance and requires the permit holder to get it before entering the launching site. This regulation is different from the practices of other states. Concerning that China is the sponsor of APSCO, for the purpose of promoting commercial space cooperation, a harmonized approach to domestic law is recommended to be found.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.11-20
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• 2013

Space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) has been one of the most effective tools for monitoring quantitative oceanographic physical parameters. The Doppler information recorded in single-channel SAR raw data can be useful in estimating moving velocity of water mass in ocean. The Doppler shift is caused by the relative motion between SAR sensor and the water mass of ocean surface. Thus, the moving velocity can be extracted by measuring the Doppler anomaly between extracted Doppler centroid and predicted Doppler centroid. The predicted Doppler centroid, defined as the Doppler centroid assuming that the target is not moving, is calculated based on the geometric parameters of a satellite, such as the satellite's orbit, look angle, and attitude with regard to the rotating Earth. While the estimated Doppler shift, corresponding to the actual Doppler centroid in the situation of real SAR data acquisition, can be extracted directly from raw SAR signal data, which usually calculated by applying the Average Cross Correlation Coefficient(ACCC). The moving velocity was further refined to obtain ocean surface current by subtracting the phase velocity of Bragg-resonant capillary waves. These methods were applied to Envisat ASAR raw data acquired in the East Sea, and the extracted ocean surface currents were compared with the current measured by HF-radar.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.431-444
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• 2014

As applications of spaceborne SAR imagery are extended, there are increased demands for accurate registrations for better understanding and fusion of radar images. It becomes common to adopt multi-resolution SAR images to apply for wide area reconnaissance. Geometric correction of the SAR images can be performed by using satellite orbit and attitude information. However, the inherent errors of the SAR sensor's attitude and ground geographical data tend to cause geometric errors in the produced SAR image. These errors should be corrected when the SAR images are applied for multi-temporal analysis, change detection applications and image fusion with other sensor images. The undesirable ground registration errors can be corrected with respect to the true ground control points in order to produce complete SAR products. Speeded Up Robust Feature (SURF) technique is an efficient algorithm to extract ground control points from images but is considered to be inappropriate to apply to SAR images due to high speckle noises. In this paper, an attempt is made to apply SURF algorithm to SAR images for image registration and fusion. Matched points are extracted with respect to the varying parameters of Hessian and SURF matching thresholds, and the performance is analyzed by measuring the imaging matching accuracies. A number of performance measures concerning image registration are suggested to validate the use of SURF for spaceborne SAR images. Various simulations methodologies are suggested the validate the use of SURF for the geometric correction and image registrations and it is shown that a good choice of input parameters to the SURF algorithm should be made to apply for the spaceborne SAR images of moderate resolutions.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.67-74
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• 2002

Optical observations of Geostationary and Molynia orbit spin-stabilized satellites over the Korean peninsula have been carried out at the Kyung Hee University Observatory with a 30 inch telescope. We have observed 5 spin-stabilized satellites, and obtained 0spin periods, which can be used for deducing a design for each bus model. Verifications of spin periods of 3 known satellites from manufacturer, and observations of 2 unknown satellites were made. The difference between known spin periods and observed spin periods is 0.06sec on the average and the difference of those spin rates is 3.3rpm on the average. Those results indicate that spin periods and spin rates of observed geostationary spin-stabilized satellites are within operating limits. Spin rates of unknown satellites, Fengyun 2B and Molynia 1-87 are 89.3rpm, 78.4rpm earh. It is suggested that the research of spin stabilized satellites can be used for the determinations of standard light sources for short period celestial objects and helpful for the constructions of satellite databases with photometric and/or spectroscopic satellite observations.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.64-74
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• 2018

Small high-resolution Earth observation satellites require precise optical alignment at the submicron level. However, misalignments can occur due to the influence of external factors during the launch and operation despite the sufficient alignment processes that take place before the launch. Thus, satellites need to realign their optical elements in orbit in what is known as a refocusing process to compensate for any misalignments. Refocusing algorithms developed for satellites have only considered de-space, which is the most sensitive factor with respect to image quality. However, the existing algorithms can cause correction error when inner and external forces generate tilt amount in an optical system. The present work suggests an improved online refocusing algorithm by considering the tilting effect for application in the case of a de-spaced and tilted optical system. In addition, the algorithm is considered to be efficient in terms of time and cost because it is designed to be used as an online method that does not require ground communication.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.102-102
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• 2014

The NISS (Near-infrared Imaging Spectrometer for Star formation history) onboard NEXTSat-1 is the near-infrared instrument onboard NEXTSat-1 which is being developed by KASI. The main scientific targets are nearby galaxies, galaxy clusters, star-forming regions and low background regions in order to study the cosmic star formation history in local and distant universe. After the Preliminary Design Review, we have fixed major specifications of the NISS. The off-axis optical design with 15cm apertureis optimized to obtain a wide field of view ($2deg.{\times}2deg.$), while minimizing the sensitivity loss. The opto-mechanical structure of the NISS was designed to be safe enough to endure in the launching condition as well as the space environment. The tolerance analysis was performed to cover the wide wavelength range from 0.95 to $3.8{\mu}m$ and to reduce the degradation of optical performance due to thermal variation at the target temperature, 200K. The $1k{\times}1k$ infrared sensor is operated in the dewar at 80K stage. We confirmed that the NISS can be cooled down to below 200K in the nominal orbit through a radiative cooling. Here, we report the preliminary design of the NISS.

• Spatial Information Research
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.111-121
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• 2007

The GPS positioning offer 3D position using code and carrier phase measurements, but the user can obtain the precise accuracy positioning using carrier phase in Real Time Kinematic(RTK). The main problem, which RTK have to overcome, is the necessary to have a reference station(RS) when using RTK should be generally no more than 10km on average, which is significantly different from DGPS, where distances to RS can exceed several hundred kilometers. The accuracy of today's RTK is limited by the distance dependent errors from orbit, ionosphere and troposphere as well as station dependent influences like multipath and antenna phase center variations. For these reasons, the author proposes Network based GPS Carrier Phase Differential Positioning using Multiple RS which is detached from user receiver about 30km. An important part of the proposed system is algorithm and software development, named DAUNet. The main process is corrections computation, corrections interpolation and searching for the integer ambiguity. Corrections computation of satellite by satellite and epoch by epoch at each reference station are calculated by a Functional model and Stochastic model based on a linear combination algorithm and corrections interpolation at user receiver are used by area correction parameters. As results, the users can obtain the cm-level positioning.

• Journal of Korean Society for Geospatial Information Science
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• v.10 no.4 s.22
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• pp.41-50
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• 2002

RPM is the one of the sensor models which is proposed by Open GIS Consortium (OGC) as image transfer standard. And it is the sensor model for end-users using IKONOS, a commercial pushbroom satellite, imagery which provide about 1m ground resolution. Parameters called RPC which is IKONOS RFM coefficients are serviced to end-users. But if some users try to make additional effort to get rigorous geo-spatial information, it is necessary to apply mathematic or abstract sensor models, because vendors don't offer any ancillary data for physical sensor models such as satellite orbit and navigation. Abstract sensor models such as pushbroom Direct Linear Transform (DLT) require many GCPs well distributed in imagery, and mathematic sensor model such as RFM, polynomials need much more GCPs. Therefore RPC modification using additional a few GCPs is the best solution. In this paper, two methods are proposed to modify RPC. One is method to use pseudo GCPs generated in normalized cubic, and another method uses parameters observations and a few GCPs. Through two methods, we get improvement of accuracy 50% and over.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.330-346
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• 1997

Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite I (KOMPSAT-I, the first multi-purpose Korean satellite) will be launched in the third quarter of 1999, which is operated on the sun-synchronous orbit for cartography, ocean color monitoring, and space environment monitoring. The main mission of Electro-Optical Camera(EOC) which is one of KOMPSAT-I sensors is to provide images for the production of scale maps of Korea. EOC collects panchromatic imagery with the ground sample distance of 6.6m at nadir through visible spectral band of 510~730nm. For determining KOMPSAT-I crossing time over Korea, this study examines the diurnal variation of solar and atmospheric variables that can exert a great influence on the EOC imagery. The results are as follows: 1) After 10:30 a.m. at the winter solstice, solar zenith angle is less than $70^{\circ}$ and expected flux of EOC spectral band over land for clear sky is greater than about $2.4mW/cm^2$. 2) For daytime the distribution of cloud cover (clear sky) shows minimum (maximum) at about 11:00 a.m. Although the occurrence frequency of poor visibility by fog decreases from early morning toward noon, its effect on the distribution of clear sky is negligible. From the above examination it is concluded that determining KOMPSAT-I crossing time over Korea between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. is adequate.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.463-472
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• 2005

In this paper, the dynamic model development for interplanetary navigation has been discussed. The Cowell method for special perturbation theories was employed to develop an interplanetary trajectory propagator including the perturbations due to geopotential, the Earth's dynamic polar motion, the gravity of the Sun, the Moon and the other planets in the solar system, the relativistic effect of the Sun, solar radiation pressure, and atmospheric drag. The equations of motion in dynamic model were numerically integrated using Adams-Cowell 11th order predictor-corrector method. To compare the influences of each perturbation, trajectory propagation was performed using initial transfer orbit elements of the Mars Express mission launched in 2003, because it can be the criterion to choose proper perturbation models for navigation upon required accuracy. To investigate the performance of dynamic model developed, it was tested whether the spacecraft can reach the Mars. The interplanetary navigation tool developed in this study demonstrated the spacecraft entering the Mars SOI(Sphere of Influence) and its velocity .elative to the Mars was less than the escape velocity of the Mars, hence, the spacecraft can arrive at the target planet. The obtained results were also verified by using the AGI Satellite Tool Kit. It is concluded that the developed program is suitable for supporting interplanetary spacecraft mission for a future Korean Mars mission.