Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
This week sees the latest high-resolution Earth Observation (EO) satellites launched for Maxar, a potential world first for space with five rocket launches in 24 hours, and finally we look at the latest contracts for the Copernicus Contributing Missions.
Latest Launches
On Tuesday, SpaceX launched the final pair of Maxar’s WorldView Legion’s high-resolution EO optical satellites. WorldView 5 and 6 were put into an orbit of approximately 540 kilometres from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This pair of satellites follows two previous pairs which were launched in May and August last year.
Like their predecessors, these satellites are carrying a WorldView Legion Camera, which has nine spectral wavebands – two blue wavebands, one green, one yellow, three red, and one near-infrared, all offering a spatial resolution of 1.16 metres, together with one panchromatic band offering a spatial resolution of 29 centimetres. The swath width for all bands is three kilometres. Once the full six satellite constellation is operational, it’s estimated that they will image 6 million square kilometres of the planet every day.
Space World First – Almost?
Although, not entirely EO related, it is worth noting the SpaceX WorldView launch was meant to be part of a historic day as, for the first time, five rockets were due to be launched within 24 hours. Sadly, though at least one launch did not take place.
Successful launches alongside the WorldView satellites were:
- SpaceX launched a batch of Starlink satellites, also from Florida.
- Blue Origin launched it’s suborbital New Shepard rocket on an uncrewed research mission.
- Russia’s Roscosmos launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, although no details are currently known on the payload.
This tied the current record of four launches in a single day, but a new record did not happen as, unfortunately, Rocket Lab chose not to launch its Electron rocket from New Zealand due to ‘space traffic’. It was carrying five satellites for the French company Kinéis’ on the named “IoT 4 You and Me” mission, which is expected to be launched later this week.
Copernicus Contributing Missions
The latest contracts for the Copernicus Contributing Missions were announced last week at the 17th Space Conference in Brussels. While the Sentinel missions are the cornerstone of the Copernicus Programme, the European Commission has, via ESA, brought in a range of, mostly commercial, Contributing Missions; these aim to support the overall Copernicus programme offering complimentary Earth Observation data beyond that provided directly by the Sentinel missions. It also allows the Copernicus programme to benefit from the latest developments in EO data collection.
Last week, just under twenty contracts were announced. The majority of these were for European satellite data suppliers, with six offered to established data providers including:  Hisdesat, E-Geos, Airbus Defence and Space (for both their French and German entities), Iceye, & Geosat. The second tranche of European suppliers are emerging scale-up providers, and it is hoped this will help these companies’ development and space sector and provide visibility to publicise their services; these include: Kuva Space, Aerospacelab, Prométhée Earth Intelligence, Orora Technologies, Constellr, Satlantis, Endurosat, & Absolut Sensing. The final group of companies offered contracts supply data from non-European satellites, and these were: EUSI, GHGSat, Planet Labs, & MDA Space.
Conclusion
Last week we talked about how the EO industry is expected to continue to grow and this week provides further evidence of the potential for both the EO and space sectors. We have new launches, a world record, and increasing the amount and type of data available through the Copernicus programme. Who knows what next week could bring!
