China's domestic remote sensing satellites have come a remarkably long way in just a few decades. Starting from the resource satellites of the 1980s, moving on to the Gaofen series and the environment and disaster monitoring constellations, and now reaching the era of sub-metre commercial satellites going up on a regular basis, the country's in-orbit imaging capability has climbed into the world's top tier. Today's Chinese satellites don't merely "see" the ground — they see it clearly and quickly. The same area can be revisited within a matter of days, ground resolution has dropped to roughly half a metre, and in city scenes you can pick out roads, rooftops and even the outlines of large vehicles. This data feeds into land surveys, agricultural yield estimation, urban planning, disaster response and environmental monitoring, and it increasingly finds its way into the everyday work of ordinary businesses and researchers.
Now, a few words about the location of this capture — Wuhu. Situated in the southeastern part of Anhui Province on the south bank of the lower Yangtze, Wuhu is a provincial sub-centre and an important member of the Yangtze River Delta city cluster. The land here is flat and crisscrossed by waterways: the Qingyi River runs through the city before joining the Yangtze, and a number of lakes, including Longwo Lake and Kuihu Lake, dot the surrounding area, giving it the classic look of a Jiangnan water town. Wuhu also has a solid industrial base, with strong clusters in automobiles and auto parts, new materials, electronics and robotics. The urban area stretches along the river in a belt, the Jiangbei New Area keeps expanding, and beyond the city limits lie broad expanses of farmland, woodland and villages — which is exactly why high-resolution satellite imagery reveals such rich surface detail across this city.
The images below are 0.7-metre GF7 satellite images of Wuhu City captured in April 2026.
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GF7 is a high-resolution optical remote sensing satellite built primarily for urban surveying and mapping, land and resource investigation, agricultural monitoring and disaster assessment. It carries a high-resolution optical camera capable of recording ground scenes in sharp detail from an orbital altitude of several hundred kilometres, with panchromatic ground resolution better than 1 metre — more than enough for large-scale mapping and detailed interpretation.
The satellite also offers flexible attitude manoeuvrability, allowing side-looking imaging and rapid revisits over priority areas. Working together with ground-based data processing systems, it can complete the whole chain from imaging and downlink to archiving within a short time, delivering users the most up-to-date surface imagery. The Wuhu images shown here, captured in April 2026, present a clear layering of urban buildings, roads, farmland and water bodies, making them excellent material for studying urban spatial change.
For users who need to track the same area over the long term, GF7 can also work in constellation with other satellites in the same series, forming a stable time series that helps reveal urban expansion, changes in crop planting structure and the progress of construction projects.
Panchromatic Resolution
0.7 m
Launch Date
3 November 2019
Multispectral Resolution
2.8 m
Orbit Altitude
Approx. 500 km
Orbit Type
Sun-synchronous repeat orbit
Revisit Period
Approx. 3 ~ 5 days
Imaging Swath
Approx. 20 km
Spectral Bands
Pan + Blue / Green / Red / NIR
Data Format
GeoTIFF / standard imagery products
Main Applications
Surveying & mapping, land investigation, agricultural monitoring, disaster assessment
