The first one, SCD-1, was launched on February 9, 1993, and was the first satellite developed entirely in Brazil and it remains in operation in orbit to this date. SCD-1 was designed, developed, built, and tested by Brazilian scientists, engineers, and technicians working at National Institute of Space Research and in Brazilian industries. It was made to be launched with a Brazilian rocket in 1989. Once it was officially recognized that the rocket could not be completed until many years later, SCD-1, after undergoing minor adaptations, was finally launched with a Pegasus rocket made by Orbital Sciences. The rocket was launched from a B-52 airplane while flying over the Atlantic Ocean.
SCD-1 is an experimental communication satellite with an environmental mission. It receives data collected on the ground or at sea by hundreds of automatic data-collecting platforms (DCPs) and retransmits all the information in a combined real-time signal back to tracking stations on Earth. Applications include hydrology, meteorology, and monitoring of the environment in general. The data are used by agencies such as the Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies Center (Centro de Previsão do Tempo e Estudos Climáticos—CPTEC), hydroelectric power managers, and both private and governmental institutions with many different interests. An example is meteorological and environmental data collected in the Amazon region, including the levels of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These data are transmitted to INPE and are used for monitoring forest fires.
SCD-1 weighs approximately 110 kg and goes around the Earth every 100 minutes on a nearly circular orbit at about 760 km altitude.[4] The inclination of the orbit with respect to the plane of the equator is 25 degrees, providing excellent coverage of equatorial, tropical, and subtropical regions (up to about 35 degrees of latitude) around the world. The spin-stabilized spacecraft has the shape of an octagonal prism, with a diameter of 1 meter and a height near 70 cm without the antennas that are mounted on both base surfaces. It was originally designed for a life of one year with 80% probability, but it has survived 30 years in operation (as of 2023)[1] without any crippling functional failure. However, since its chemical (nickel-cadmium) batteries are now completely run down, the satellite can no longer be used while it is in the Earth's shadow.
SCD-2A (Satélite de Coleta de Dados 2A in Portuguese) was a fully planned, constructed and qualified Brazilian data collection satellite in Brazil.[6] SCD-2A was identical to SCD-2, which was successfully launched in 1998. SCD-2A was lost in the inaugural launch of the Brazilian rocket VLS-1 in 1997.
The SCD-2A was launched into space on November 2, 1997, by means of a VLS-1 rocket from the Alcântara Launch Center in state of Maranhão, Brazil. It had a mass of 115 kilograms.[7] However, the satellite was lost due to an ignition failure in one of the first-stage thrusters during the first few seconds of flight, requiring the activation of the vehicle's self-destruct command.
SCD-2 has the function to collect the environmental data to be later picked up by tracer stations and be distributed to organizations and to various users. SCD-2 was launched on October 23, 1998, by a Pegasus rocket, that was transported under the wing of a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, that launched it from 13 km altitude. It is the second satellite of MECB - Complete Brazilian Space Mission - program developed by INPE. Its solar panels were built with technology developed in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in partnership with the project team of the satellite's power subsystem by INPE.
On its 10th birthday, on 23 October 2008, SCD-2 had completed 52,807 orbits around the Earth. Within a decade, it had covered a distance of 2,365,088,861 kilometers, which corresponds to 3,112 times round trips to the moon and back (distance between Earth and the Moon: approximately 236,000 miles).[8] SCD-2 has now more than doubled these figures, having completed its second decade of successful operation in orbit.
