CBERS and me

I think it's time for me to talk a little about how I began working with remote sensing.

It was the end of 1998 and I was just about to leave on vacation, after the end of the semester, when I met a friend that had just seen an employment announcement in our university job board. At the time, I had just left my former job to focus on finishing my degree and was not looking for a job at all.

According to him, a company was searching for people interested in working for the brazilian space program. In my mind the only space program we had was the military attempts to build a satellite launcher (a.k.a. ballistic missile). It never crossed my mind that we were almost ready to operate a remote sensing satellite. I didn't give it much thought and went to Cabo Frio for a season on the beach.

One weekend he came over and we talked for a long time about his new job and all the things he was learning. He said the company was still looking for programmers and asked if I was interested. I cut my vacation short and came back to Rio for the job interview.

The company was in reality a small room in an apartment building in front of the beach near my own home in Barra da Tijuca, a neighborhood in the west side of Rio. They had been doing system specification for a while and now we had to built it in 6 months. I would be working in Red-Hat Linux 4.2, a short time later migrating to 5, and programming in C. The system would later be deployed to a DEC Workstation. My previous experience was with C++ and Delphi on Windows and some C on AIX, but not much. I also had a little experience with the now infamous SCO Unix.

We were under contract to a french company named Matra Systems et Information (that later became Aérospatiale and finally EADS), developing the image processing sub-system for the CBERS, China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite, ground station.

I began working for DVR (later Gisplan and finally AMS Kepler) in Jan 1999, CBERS-1 was successfully launched from China on October 14 of the same year. I was so nervous I can't even remember how the first reception went.

By the time CBERS-2, mostly a copy of CBERS-1, was getting ready for launch there was a big change in INPE's direction, with a focus on releasing satellite imagery for free using the internet. They also wanted the new system to be able to process there historical archives for MSS, TM and later to process LANDSAT-7 ETM+ data. We won the bid for the system, this time as the prime contractor, and the Multi-Satellite Station System, MS3, was born, but this is a topic for another post.