COSMO-SKYMED MISSION: FIRST RESULTS AND FUTURE OUTLOOK

摘要

Since 2007 Italian Space Agency (ASI) launched three out of four X-band SAR satellites of the Constellation of small Satellites for Mediterranean basin Observation (COSMO-SkyMed) Mission, making available to the users a unique SAR constellation dedicated to the Earth Observation. COSMO-SkyMed is the largest Italian investment in Space Systems for Earth Observation, commissioned and funded by ASI and Italian Ministry of Defense (MoD). COSMO-SkyMed is a Dual-Use (Civilian and Defence) end-to-end Earth Observation System aimed to establish a global service supplying provision of data, products and services relevant to a wide range of applications, especially in the field of Risk Management for both Scientific/Commercial and Defence/Intelligence use.The system consists of a constellation of four Low Earth Orbit mid-sized satellites, each equipped with a multi-mode high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operating at X-band. The high resolution imaging and time performances, make of COSMO-SkyMed a unique system that already showed all its potentiality in several application domains such as risk and emergency management, multi-temporal acquisition for agriculture monitoring, ship detection, interferometry, landslides monitoring, maritime surveillance and security, rapid mapping. The constellation will be completed with the launch of the forth satellites in 2010.