FORMOSAT-2 was successfully launched on Friday, May 21 and captured its first image on June 4. The image area covers most parts of Taiwan, including northern, central, southern, and eastern Taiwan and the offshore island. The resolution of FORMOSAT-2 is 2 meters for black/white images and 8 meters for color images. Since FORMOSAT-2 is scheduled to cross Taiwan's western seashore at 9:40 am each day, the satellite can be used for observing the daily variations for the purposes such as disaster investigation, environment monitoring and measurement, and farm produce survey. Originally, National Space Organization (NSPO) has scheduled to conduct tasks such as image quality inspection, scheduling accuracy inspection, remote sensing instrument evaluation, image processing parameters calibrations, and etc. on FORMOSAT-2 in July.

When Typhoon Mindulle hit Taiwan on July 1, it had brought days of heavy rain shower and caused significant damages to the central and southern part of Taiwan. NSPO, then, immediately cancelled original satellite image capture mission of FORMOSAT-2 and began to capture daily images of central and southern Taiwan since Saturday, July 3. Since the clouds had not dissipated, FORMOSAT-2 was unable to take clear ground images. On Monday, July 5, although the clouds were still heavy, FORMOSAT-2 was able to capture images over certain areas, including Shuili, Puli, Tsaoling, Chenyulan River, Zengwun River, Jhoushuei River, and Chishan River, through the cracks between clouds. By comparing to the SPOT images captured by National Central University's Institute of Space Science prior to the Typhoon, the situation of riverbed flooding can be estimated.

Within the next few days, NPSO will continue to closely capture images of the disaster areas in order to provide information for disaster prevention and rescue purposes.