The first two Oriental Smart Eye hyperspectral satellites compress fifteen seconds of footage into a few kilobytes rather than sending gigabytes of raw data back to the ground.
On August 6, 2026 at 10:38 a.m., a Smart Dragon-3 rocket lifted off from a platform at sea off the coast of Haiyang, Shandong Province, to place the Oriental Smart Eye 01 and 02 hyperspectral satellites into orbit. Each carries AI computing power of up to 400 TOPS — or, according to Star.ai co-founder Song Bingchen, the equivalent of thirteen to twenty high-end laptops.
Their particularity has less to do with the optics — five meters of spatial resolution, 300 kilometers of swath, 22 calibrated spectral channels — than with what they make of the images. Instead of transmitting the raw data, they analyze it on board: engineer Peng Feiyu indicates that fifteen seconds of shooting are processed in orbit in ten to fifteen minutes, reducing the volume from several gigabytes to a few kilobytes.
The targeted applications range from agricultural and forestry monitoring to environmental protection, monitoring of marine and mineral resources and disaster response. The Oriental Smart Eye constellation is expected to eventually consist of 258 satellites, with a full deployment targeted for 2030.
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