[3][4] The satellite was built by a group of engineers from Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) and Algerian Centre National des Techniques Spatiales (CNTS).

The DMC was the first satellite constellation designed for that objective.

The launch took place on 28 November 2002 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on a Kosmos-3M launcher in -20 degree Celsius weather.

The onboard instrumentation consists of two banks with three Earth imaging cameras each that, in total, has a resolution of 32 meters in three spectral bands (NIR, red, and green).

During the first three months of operations, more than 80 images were transmitted back to Earth.