China's Smart Dragon 3 rocket successfully launches 2 satellites from sea

The modules are designed to perform in-orbit processing, including anomaly detection, surface-feature identification, intelligent compression and feature extraction, instead of transmitting all raw imagery to the ground for processing. This could reduce the amount of data to be downlinked and shorten the time for delivering usable information from days to minutes.

Once in operation, the pair will work with a separate high-resolution satellite already in orbit to form a system combining broad-area surveys with detailed observations.