Advanced Land Observing Satellite, ALOS is a Japanese Earth-Observation satellite, developed by JAXA. The objective of the mission is to provide the user community with data of sufficient resolution to be able to generate 1:25,000 scale maps. It is one of the largest Earth observing satellites ever developed. ALOS has a GPS receiver and a laser reflector as tools for orbit determination. ALOS is continuously operating more than 4 years and it works very well. ALOS has three mission instruments i.e. an L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar called PALSAR, and two optical sensors called PRISM and AVNIR-2.

ALOS Specifications:

Resolution	PRISM (at nadir) 2.5 m
	AVNIR-2 (at nadir) 10 m
Nominal Swath Width	PRISM(at nadir) 35 km x 35 km (can be up to 70 km)
	AVNIR-2 (at nadir) 70 km x 70 km
Bands	PRISM: 480 – 710 nm
	AVNIR-2 Blue: 420 – 500 nm
	AVNIR-2 Green: 520- 600 nm
	AVNIR-2 Red: 610- 690 nm
	Near Infrared: 760- 890 nm
Archive Availability	From 2006
Programmability	NO
Minimum Area of Purchase	Full scenes only
Stereo Available	YES, PRISM only
Best Scale	1:15,000 – (PRISM)
	1:15,000 – (PRISM pan-sharpened AVNIR-2)
	1:40,000 – (AVNIR-2)