Launched in April 2013, GF-1 is equipped with two 2 m panchromatic and 8 m multispectral cameras (PMC), and 4 wide field imagers (WFI) with 16 m MS medium-resolution and a combined swath of 830 km.
The complete camera set of PMC and WFI (6 cameras) may observe simultaneously, or each camera set (PMC or WFI) may observe separately. The revisit frequency of the spacecraft is ≤4 days and the observation range of the mission covers a region between 80ºN to ~80ºS. It mainly applies in land resource investigation, mineral resource management, atmospheric and water environment quality monitoring, and natural disaster emergency response and monitoring. GF is the Chinese abbreviation for "GAO FEN" - meaning "high-resolution".
Operator: SpaceView (China).
Technical characteristics
| Mode: | Panchromatic | Multispectral | Wide field imagers |
| Sensor bands (µm): | 0.45–0.90 | blue: 0.45–0.52 green: 0.52–0.59 red: 0.63–0.69 Near-IR: 0.77–0.89 |
blue: 0.45–0.52 green: 0.52–0.59 red: 0.63–0.69 Near-IR: 0.77–0.89 |
| Spatial resolution, m: | 2 | 8 | 16 |
| Dynamic range: | 10 bits | ||
| Swath width, km: | 69 | 830 | |
| Revisit time | 4 days | ||