Francesco Caltagirone

Status, results, potentiality and evolution of COSMO-SkyMed, the Italian Earth Observation constellation for risk management and security

COSMO-SkyMed is a Dual-Use program, devoted to produce both civilian and military applications, and as such it is required to have a fast response time, to manage conflicts and to optimize resources.

COSMO-SkyMed system commissioning: End-to-end system performance verification

This paper presents the results of the end-to-end performance verification campaign performed in the frame of the COSMO-SkyMed system commissioning. After a brief introduction that provides an overview of the context in which the activity has been developed, the paper describes the reference parameters that have been individuated in order to evaluate the COSMO-SkyMed system performances and shows as these parameters have been used in the frame of the verification of system compliance with reference to the applicable requirements. The tests performed to measure these relevant parameters together with a description of the related scenarios and general conditions and constraints are presented. Finally the paper reports the achieved results and associated conclusions.

The COSMO-SkyMed Dual Use Earth Observation Program: Development, Qualification, and Results of the Commissioning of the Overall Constellation

COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) is the largest Italian investment in Space Systems for Earth Observation, commissioned and funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian Ministry of Defense (It-MoD). The CSK constellation has been completely qualified in orbit since 2010 and it is still operating at full performance with a constellation of four mid-sized satellites placed in Low Earth Orbit, each carrying a high-resolution X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and a full-featured Ground Segment to exploit observation capabilities and providing SAR imaging servicing worldwide. The primary mission objective of CSK is the provision of services able to quickly answer to the user needs in the domains of Monitoring of land and environmental resources, Strategic Surveillance for Defense and Intelligence, Maritime Control, Topography, and Commercial applications as well. CSK fulfills civilian and defense needs, enhancing international partnerships through its interoperability, expandability, and multisensor (IEM) features and practices. Thanks to these features, CSK is an asset for international partnership such as the Italian-Argentinean Satellite System for Emergency Management (SIASGE). This paper intends to delineate how those fundamental characteristics of CSK have been qualified and commissioned from the launch of the first CSK satellite in 2007 through its progressive deployment until the system in-flight final acceptance (S-IFAR) event in 2010 that has completed the orbiting four-satellite qualified configuration. Nowadays, CSK is operating at full performance, constituting an asset for its firstclass radar observation capabilities, state-of-the-art technology aimed at improving security of countries, safety, and life quality of their citizens.

Interferometric Missions: Applications within ASI Space Programs

The Italian Space Agency (ASI), together with Ministry of Defence (I-AD), is involved in the realization of the COSMO-Skymed program that foresees the deployment of a constellation of 4 SAR satellites in Low Earth Orbit, dedicated to the management, control and exploitation of Earth resources for civilian and defence applications. ASI is responsible for the definition, implementation and management of the Program, while Alcatel Alenia Space Italia is the Prime Contractor responsible for the design, development and verification of the entire system. The nominal phasing of the satellites on the orbit plane has been selected in order to achieve the optimisation of the performance in terms of accessibility and revisit time w.r.t. the number of satellites. Moreover COSMO-SkyMed system is able to perform interferometric acquisitions, which yield three dimensional images and/or provide various information on land conformation change, subsidence, land-slides and so on. Then, periodically, one of the four satellites will be moved to a fixed distance with respect to another for reaching the interferometric configuration. In order to increase the operating capacity of the COSMO-Skymed system, ASI intends to start the definition of a complementary civilian program with the purpose of covering bi-static and across-track/along-across interferometry applications. Such a mission will be referred as “SABRINA”, acronym of “System for Advanced Bistatic and Radar INterferometry Applications”, based on the use of a “passive” satellite (“BISSAT”, acronym for “Bistatic and Interferometric SAR SATellite”). This satellite will fly in formation with COSMO-Skymed and then a suitable strategy shall be determined for reaching and maintaining the interferometric configuration.

Experimental verification of COSMO-SkyMed SAR capabilities

COSMO-SkyMed is the Italian Remote Sensing programme which foresees the utilization of a constellation of four SAR Satellites in Low Earth Orbit, dedicated to the management, control and exploitation of Earth resources for civil and defence applications. The program is completely funded by the Italian Government, mainly through the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR) and the Ministry of Defence (I-AD). Thales Alenia Space Italia is responsible for the design, development and verification of the complete constellation. Satellites will take SAR images of the Earth in the X-band for a variety of government, commercial and scientific users, providing data with unprecedented quality in terms of numbers of images, resolution and accuracy. Following the canonical space qualification and acceptance processes customers and Thales Alenia Space Italia decided to pursue an end-to-end experimental verification of the SAR instrument in order to provide evidence of its capabilities. With respect to the classical approach for the on-ground verification of space-borne SAR which is done through the verification by parts and the final analytical compilation, it was decided to set-up an outdoor verification Test able to exploit all radar functionalities and performance in an integrated approach i.e. radar electronics, antenna and calibrated targets all together. In this paper they are described the test-set-up and the results of the experimental verification campaign made through the qualification hardware of the SAR.

COSMO-Skymed: The Earth Observation Italian Constellation for Risk Management and Security

C (constellation of small satellites for Mediterranean basin observation) is the largest Italian investment in space systems for Earth observation, commissioned and funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and Italian Ministry of Defense (MOD). The system, currently in the production phase, consists of a constellation of low-Earth-orbit midsized satellites, each carrying a multimode high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument operating at X-band and a full featured global ground segment to properly exploit space capabilities. The primary COSMO-SkyMed system mission objective is the provision of services able to quickly answer user needs in the following domains: 1) land monitoring for territory risk management; 2) territory strategic surveillance for intelligence and homeland security; 3) specifi c defense purposes; 4) management of environmental resources, maritime and shoreline control, and law enforcement;

COSMO-Skymed: An Italian infrastructure for the international earth observation community

The COSMO-SkyMed infrastructure is an Italian asset developed to satisfy the national dual user needs and to enhance the Earth Observation Community capabilities. The infrastructure is composed by the Space Segment, the Ground Segment and of the Integrated Logistic Support and Operations Segment. Rather than going into the deep technical description of the system capabilities, the aim of this paper is to provide the overall picture of the services available, from the user perspective, given by this Italian infrastructure, with particular reference to its evolution in the second generation. The systems overall space capacity relies on four Earth Observation SAR satellites belonging to the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) first generation currently operating and the two COSMO-SkyMed di Seconda Generazione (COSMOSkyMed Second Generation) follow-on satellites, aimed at providing operational continuity to CSK with increased performance, flexibility and ability to respond to updated civilian and defence user needs.

COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation Planner

COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation (CSG) system has been conceived, according to Italian Space Agency (ASI) and Italian Ministry of Defence (It-MoD) requirements, at the twofold objective of ensuring operational continuity to the current constellation (COSMO-SkyMed - CSK), while improving functionality and performances. It is an “end-to-end” Italian Earth Observation Dual-Use (Civilian and Defence) Space System with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operating in X-Band. CSG mission planning purpose is to fully employ the system resources, shared between partners with very different needs, producing a mission plan that satisfies the higher priority requests and optimizes the overall plan with the remaining requests according to the users programming rights consumption. CSG Mission Planning tool provides new performances in terms of adaptability and flexibility of the planning and scheduling algorithms conceived to select and synchronize data acquisition and downloading activities. CSG planning and scheduling problem is characterized by a large size of research space and a particular structure of technical and managerial constraints that has led to the implementation of innovative design of the planning algorithms based on both priority criteria and saturation of system resources. This approach envisages two scheduling strategies: the rank-based and the optimization-based. The former strategy is firstly applied to the most important request categories, with an associated rank value or priority level; the latter is subsequently applied to the unranked or lower priority requests. This is an iterative dynamic process of finding optimal solutions able to better answer the demanding requirements coming from the needs of heterogeneous users.