The Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) was designed as a proof of concept constellation, capable of multispectral imaging of any part of the world every day. It is unique in that each satellite is independently owned and controlled by a separate nation, but all satellites have been equally spaced around a sun-synchronous orbit to provide daily imaging capability.

Country Designation Type Imager Launch Algeria Alsat-1 DMC 32m MS 2002 China Beijing-1 DMC+4 32m MS / 4m Pan 2005 Nigeria Nigeriasat-1 DMC 32m MS 2003 Turkey Bilsat-1 Mission Completed 2006 UK UK-DMC DMC 32m MS 2003 Spain Deimos-1 DMC 22m MS 2008 UK UK-DMC2 DMC 22m MS 2008

The satellites are all designed and built at Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) in the UK. Through the support of the British National Space Centre, SSTL owns and operates the UK satellite in the constellation.

Although its headline objective is to support the logistics of disaster relief, its main function is to provide independent daily imaging capability to the partner nations; Algeria, Nigeria, Turkey, UK and China.

The DMC satellites provide a unique Earth Observation resource that enables daily revisit anywhere in the world. This is possible with only a few satellites because they are designed to image a large area of up to 600 x 600km. This greatly improves the value of the data as it often avoids the need for mosaics of images from different seasons.

All DMC Members agree to provide 5% of capacity free for daily imaging of disaster areas, and this data is channelled to aid agencies through Reuters AlertNet in the beginning. The DMC Consortium has agreed to consider participation in the International Charter for Space in Major Disasters, contributing daily imaging capability to fill the existing 3-5 day response gap. UK-DMC also provides data through an ESA project called RESPOND. In addition the DMC Members are interested in encouraging the use of DMC data for scientific and commercial applications.