Monitoring disasters in the futureĭisasters-both involving forces of nature and those that are man-made-are not new. 8, 2019.īelow is a view of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant on Feb. Maxar’s WorldView-3 collected this image of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant on Oct.
“On March 14, 2011, it just happened that one of the reactors exploded between two of our satellites imaging it, providing key insights into a developing situation.” “It’s a careful balancing act to task the satellites to collect the most relevant areas while in a constantly changing scenario like this disaster, which is why I often came into work at night to adjust collection plans with the most recent information,” said Amy Opperman, Senior Project Manager at Maxar. Maxar’s analysts and Collection Planning Team closely coordinated with customers to monitor the reactors and the overall relief efforts in Japan. The world was riveted and waited for news about the nuclear reactors. WorldView-2 imaged it through the clouds. The Fukushima Dai-ichi Unit 1 Reactor Building in Okuma, Japan, exploded on March 13, 2011. As these nuclear cores started overheating, Maxar’s Collection Planning Team concentrated their efforts on imaging the facilities so safety personnel could monitor them from a safe distance. The tsunami waves came over ocean walls and damaged the backup generators that were running the cooling systems of two of the plants, most notably at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant. The earthquake caused the three nuclear power plants closest to the epicenter to shut down. MaDisaster #3: a nuclear emergency emerges This gallery shows analysis reports provided to customers on March 12, 2011, that point out some of the most serious damage. “JSI and Hitachi then distributed these high-resolution images, which unveiled in detail the damages to each building over the region, to the central government ministries, local governments and infrastructure companies, helping them to grasp the status of the disaster and plan and execute their rescue and recovery missions.” “Starting the day after the earthquake, both DigitalGlobe and GeoEye dedicated imaging capacity every day to collect a vast region in eastern Japan affected by the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear incident,” said Koji Ueda, CEO and President of Japan Space Imaging Corporation (JSI).
As the first post-quake imagery began to reach our headquarters facility, our team of analysts came into work at night and started sifting through the imagery to find and highlight the intelligence needed most by customers. Leveraging our ability to plan and quickly change what the satellites needed to image, Maxar worked closely with our customers and coordinated the satellites to ensure that they collected the most imagery possible over areas in need of observation and relief.
#Reactor meltdown earthquake full#
Imagery collection footprints are visualized above.Īt the time of this disaster, Maxar‘s legacy companies-DigitalGlobe and GeoEye-were the only ones with commercial imaging systems on orbit collecting sub-meter resolution imagery, which would prove critical in assessing the full extent of the damage. QuickBird, WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 collected more than 43,000 sq km of high-resolution imagery along Japan’s devastated northeastern coast on March 12, 2011. MaDisaster #2: a tsunami’s devastation at an incredible scale Meanwhile, at the Mission Operations Center in Colorado, Maxar’s Collection Planning Team quickly reprioritized what the satellites would image so they could collect the hardest hit regions of coastal Japan as soon as possible. The wall of water wiped out almost everything in its path. Waves were reported to be nearly 33 feet tall, and some reached 6 miles inland. Within an hour of the earthquake striking, tsunami waves started hitting the eastern coast of Japan. local time, about 80 miles offshore of the city of Sendai, Miyagi prefecture. MaDisaster #1: an earthquake of catastrophic strength This blog post tells the inside story of how Maxar team members used these satellites to collect critical information about what was happening in the area and deliver it quickly to customers, first responders and the public via the media. At the time, Maxar’s QuickBird, IKONOS, GeoEye-1, WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 satellites were collecting high-resolution imagery of Earth. These forces of nature caused the cooling systems of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi to shut down, resulting in a nuclear meltdown.
Editor’s note: Ten years ago, a 9.0 magnitude, six-minute earthquake triggered a tsunami on March 11, 2011, in Japan.
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