In July 1988, China and Brazil signed the protocol establishing the joint research and production of the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellites (CBERS).

Brazil, emerging from a long military regime, sought to abandon the Cold War logic and establish new international partnerships.

Brazil had the chance to develop medium-size satellites at a time when it was only capable of building small ones (100 kg size).

Brazil and China negotiated the CBERS project during two years (1986–1988), exchanging important technical information and visiting each other's facilities, and they concluded that both sides had all the human, technical and material conditions to jointly develop an Earth resource observation satellite program.

They have three remote sensing multispectral cameras:[7] CBERS-2B was launched on 19 September 2007 by a Long-March 4B rocket from the Taiyuan base in China.

This camera records images in one single panchromatic band 0.50 – 0.80 μm which comprises part of the visible and of the near infrared portion of electromagnetic spectrum.