While the European space firm Astrium’s communications satellite services division continues to build on its revenues, so far its Earth observation and radar imagery business has not quite delivered the revenues it expected. But Astrium continues to sense “gold in them there fields” when in comes to radar and optical Earth observation. However, it realises that to progress further it has to have some strategic partnerships.
For example, Astrium is looking for partners on its plan to offer continuous relatively high resolution moving imagery from space. Specificallly, having failed to gain European funding, it is now in discussions with Singapore to see if it would like to partner for its 8,800kg GO-3S Earth observation satellite to be positioned in Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO). That spacecraft is to provide 3m resolution imagery of tracts of Earth at a rate of 5 frames per second during daylight hours.
Meantime,Space News reports that Astirum is attempting to team up with Canada’s MDA’s RCM radar imagery operation in order to provide a ground infrastructure so that its own radar imagery from Germany’s planned TerraSAR-X2 can be more easily marketed.
