CUHK-developed satellite CUHK Sat-1 launches with mission to advance smart city development
12 March 2026
On 12 February, CUHK Sat-1 – the world’s first satellite incorporating a large AI model, dedicated to supporting sustainable urban development – was launched aboard the Smart Dragon-3 carrier rocket from the South China Sea off Guangdong province.
Developed by CUHK, the satellite has entered its designated orbit and is set to provide high-precision geospatial data services for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and major cities worldwide. Its applications span environmental monitoring, intelligent transport systems and emergency response.
The project represents a series of firsts. CUHK Sat-1 is the first Earth-observation satellite funded by the Innovation and Technology Commission of the HKSAR Government and the first such mission in which a local university has directly led the design, development and application. Partner institutions include the Hong Kong Logistics and Supply Chain MultiTech R&D Centre, Magic Cube Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. and the Civil Engineering and Development Department of the HKSAR Government.
Engineered to deal with the complex, heterogeneous components of contemporary cities, the satellite carries a high-resolution multispectral remote sensing camera with a spatial resolution of one metre. It captures data across 10 spectral bands, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared, enabling refined environmental analysis in support of disaster mitigation, smart-city planning and regional sustainable development.
CUHK Sat-1 is also the first satellite in the world to deploy a large AI language model on board. This allows near-real-time data analysis and information extraction in orbit, overcoming the longstanding bottleneck of transmitting vast volumes of raw data back to Earth for processing before getting a response. The mission thus establishes a new technological paradigm for intelligent remote sensing.
CUHK Sat-1 will operate in constellation with the Hong Kong Youth Scientific Innovation satellite, launched in 2024 with CUHK’s participation, forming Hong Kong’s first low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation.
Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, CUHK’s Vice-Chancellor and President, describes the successful orbital insertion as “not only another breakthrough for CUHK in aerospace technology but also a milestone in intelligent remote sensing and spatial information applications”.
Professor Kwan Mei-po, Chief Scientist of the CUHK Satellite Project and Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, says: “‘CUHK Sat-1 will continue to deliver high-resolution, multi-spectral Earth observation data of significant value, supporting key technological research and practical applications. We see this mission as a springboard for further frontier innovation and a testament to CUHK’s growing international impact in Earth science and aerospace remote sensing.”
Professor Ma Peifeng, Chief Engineer of the CUHK Satellite Project and Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Resource Management, adds: “To address engineering constraints, including limited on-board computing capacity and the requirement for sustained operational stability in orbit, the team undertook weight optimisation and workflow reconfiguration of the DeepSeek large AI model directly on the satellite platform for the first time. This enables in-orbit target recognition and feature extraction from multi-spectral data, marking a transition from mere data acquisition to true information acquisition.”
