THE Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) announced on Thursday it would launch a bigger Earth observation satellite in 2023 that could be used for disaster management, land use and land cover change mapping, crop monitoring, and forestry management.

The 130-kilogram multispectral unit for land assessment (MULA) commercial-grade satellite can capture operational-quality images of approximately 100,000 square kilometers of land area daily, using a true-color camera capable of capturing 5-meter resolution images with a wide swath width of 120 kilometers.