What this is

he Cosmo-Skymed satellites are intended to provide monitoring, surveillance and intelligence data during international crisis for military customers, and environmental surveillance of floods, fires, landslides, and oil spill as well as earth topographic mapping, law enforcement for commercial, civilian institutions and scientific communities. Each satellite will be equipped with one X-band multipolarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) that will provide coverage of areas with a maximum width of up to 520 km.

The Cosmo-Skymed satellites (Constellation of Small Satellites for Mediterranean basin Observation) will provide high resolution metric and sub-metric imagery through clouds, at night, with a revisit time of few hours. The 4 satellites constellation will acquire and furnish data worldwide.

The SAR sensor can work in four acquisition modes. Using the SPOTLIGHT mode the SAR scans with a resolution of one or less than a meter covering an area of tens of square kilometers. The HIMAGE (stripmap) acquisition mode provides a few meters resolution covering areas featuring a width of several tens of kilometers. The WIDEREGION, also known as ScanSAR, features tens of meters of resolution and swathes areas of hundreds of kilometers. Finally, the HUGEREGION acquisition mode swathes up to 520 km wide areas with a resolution of several tens of meters.

The first satellite was scheduled to be put into a sun-synchronous orbit in early 2005 and the last one (fourth COSMO-SkyMed satellite) was slated for launch in late 2006. Finally, the first satellite was launched June 2007 and the third spacecraft is scheduled for launch in 2008.

On December 21, 2004, the COSMOS-SkyMed procurement contract between the Italian Space Agency and Alenia Spazio (Finmeccanica) for the construction of the satellite constellation. The contract valued at 775 million Euro (approx. $1 billion) covers the three first satellites, with the contract for the fourth satellite worth 116 million Euro to be placed in a later date. Overall, the program will account for roughly 900 million Euro.

The Italian Ministry of Education will contribute to COSMOS-Skymed program with 620 million Euro and the Italian Ministry of Defense with 155 million Euro. The first satellite was delayed with the launch expected during the last quarter of 2006 while the whole system should become operational in 2008.