Details are starting to emerge of the companies involved in the contracts to deliver the six missions that together form ESA’s Earth observation programme. isardSAT will participate in the development of CRISTAL, the new Copernicus mission to monitor the sea-ice thickness and overlying snow depth.The mission, aims at measuring and monitoring sea-ice thickness and overlying snow depth, as well as changes in surface elevation in glaciers, ice caps, and the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets by means of its radar altimeter.
isardSAT is prime contractor for the System and Instrument Retrieval Simulator and Ground Processor Prototype. The processor includes Fully Focused and Swath processing capabilities in addition to the classical Delay Doppler Processing and Low Resolution methods.
isardSAT says it is acknowledged as the Expert Support Laboratory of the L1 processing of ESA satellite altimeters, due to its involvement with ERS-1/2, EnviSat, CryoSat, Sentinel-3 (pictured) and Sentinel-6 satellites.Airbus Defence and Space Germany will lead the development on CRISTAL with a contract value of €300 million.
Copernicus programme
The six “High Priority Candidate Missions” are: CHIME: Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission, CIMR: Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer, CO2M: Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring, CRISTAL: Copernicus Polar Ice and Snow Topography Altimeter, LSTM: Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Monitoring, and ROSE-L: L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar.No UK companies were chosen to lead on the six missions, which led the participating UK Space Agency to abstain on the official vote of approval in protest.Founded in 2006, isardSAT is headquartered in Barcelona with one subsidiary, isardSAT UK, based in Guildford.
UK contributions
It is estimated the value of the sub-contracting for the UK is two-thirds of what had been originally expected for Copernicus.ESA’s industrial policy committee approved contracts totalling €2.55 billion.The UK, however, should play a role in five out of the six Copernicus missions, via organisations including Airbus UK, Thales Alenia Space UK, the National Physical Laboratory, Teledyne, UKRI, Oxford University, Leicester University, IsardSat and M Squared Lasers.Thales Alenia Space (a Joint Venture between Thales and Leonardo, in France and Italy), Airbus (Germany and Spain) and OHB (Germany) were the main contract winners.
Source: This news is taken from www.electronicsweekly.com
