The 90 kg (198 lbm) AlSat-1 is the first spacecraft of an international Disaster Monitoring Constellation. AlSat-1, built by SSTL, will provide wide swath (600 km) 32-meter multispectral images and 1 GByte solid state recorders for high capacity onboard storage of image data and transmission to ground using S-band transmitter. The spacecraft is the result of international cooperation between Algeria, China, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam coordinated by SSTL. AlSat-1 will be joined in orbit by four more SSTL-built microsatellites to be launched in mid-2003. Engineers from both Surrey and Algeria built and tested the spacecraft over a 15-month period. AlSat-1 will be operated by Algeria’s Centre National des Techniques Spatiales. This is Algeria's first national satellite. A follow-on constellation with higher imaging resolution capability will begin launches in 2004.