The Remote-Sensing Satellite Ground Station, Chinese Academy of Sciences, (i.e. China Remote-Sensing Satellite Ground Station, or China RSGS for short,) founded according to the Sino-American Scientific-Technical Co-operation Memorandum signed by Mr. Deng Xiaoping and President Carter during Mr. Deng's visit to U.S.A., was inaugurated and put into operation in December, 1986. Mr.Deng Xiaoping presented his handwriting for the Station's Chinese name.

Main missions of the Station are to receive, process, archive and distribute the earth-resources data from various remote-sensing satellites, and also to make scientific researches regarding satellite remote-sensing data receiving, processing and the relevant various techniques and methods. China RSGS can receive and process satellite remote-sensing data covering the 80% land of our country and is the only supplier of civil resources-satellite remote-sensing data in the country for the time-being. Now there are 200,000 scenes of multi-spectral satellite data and 50,000 scenes of microwave remote-sensing data on archiving, and about 2,000 requests on service from users are accepted and met annually. After a series of complicated processings, the acquired earth-resources remote-sensing data are offered to users in the form of various media. The distributed data amount from China RSGS has been going up and took the 2nd place in the world in 1995.

With 11-years' efforts, China RSGS has preliminarily realized the goal of one station to a number of satellites, and has been continuously developing toward the direction of all-weather, all-time, multi-satellite, multi-resolution and nearly real-time data receiving and processing. For the time-being, the Station regularly receives and processes data from the following 4 satellites: Landsat-5 (U.S.), ERS-1/2 (European Space Agency) and JERS-1 (Japan). Now we have completed the upgrade systems for data receiving and processing of SPOT-1/2 (France) and Radarsat (Canada), estimated to be put in regular operation in 1998, and will also work to the forthcoming CBERS-1 (China and Brazil) next year.

Now we have around 600 domestic and international users of remote-sensing data distributed over 26 central ministries and commissions and 30 local provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government. These precious data have been widely applied in many fields such as: land-resources survey, oceanic-resources survey, environmental monitoring, land-administration programming, land-use survey, crops-yield assessment, geological exploration, research on deserts, glaciers and grassland, etc.

The Party and State leaders have affirmed the achievements made in China RSGS and shown their deep concern to the Station. In 1996, President Jiang Zhemin, Premier Li Peng and other leaders and famous experts gave their autographs of encouragement words respectively for the 10th anniversary of the Station's foundation. Now China RSGS is continuously making contributions to the development of our national economy.