e-GEOS and Lockheed Martin to supply satellite data to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

14 January 2010

The team consisting of the US firm Lockheed Martin and the Italian company e-GEOS (Telespazio/ASI) has been awarded a contract worth up to USD 85 million by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to provide data, products and services from the COSMO-SkyMed satellites. The contract was

signed in Denver (Colorado) and has a duration of five years.

Under this agreement, Lockheed Martin and e-GEOS will provide the NGA with images acquired from the Italian COSMO-SkyMed satellites, which will be used to develop a wide range of US government applications.

For e-GEOS, which is jointly owned by Telespazio (80%) and the Italian Space Agency (20%), the contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency represents a key commercial and strategic success in the highly competitive US defence market.

This achievement was made possible thanks to the unique and innovative features of the COSMO-SkyMed satellite system, which is a dual-use system intended for both civil and military applications funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Italian Ministry of Defence. The system is designed to operate using four satellites with synthetic aperture radar sensors (the first three satellite are already in orbit, while the fourth will be launched during 2010). These satellites are capable of operating day and night in all atmospheric conditions, and with frequent revisit times (every six hours at mid-latitudes with four

operational satellites).

The COSMO-SkyMed constellation can provide images with a resolution as high as 1 metre and has the capacity to record up to 2,400,000 square kilometres per day to be used for security applications, ground surveillance, environmental monitoring and natural resource management by public sector bodies and industry.

Telespazio, a Finmeccanica/Thales company, was responsible for building the civil and military ground segments of the system, and now controls the constellation’s in-orbit operations from the Fucino Space Centre. e-GEOS, a joint venture between Telespazio and ASI, manages the acquisition and processing of the satellite data, and sells the data on the international market.