Above: Earth-i CEO, Richard Blain meeting with Peter Young from Telespazio Vega.

This MoU will permit each company to provide each other’s specialist products and services to their respective customers. In the case of Earth-i, this will permit them to provide new and existing customers with advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from the COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation alongside their existing optical data.

 
Telespazio VEGA is owned by European aerospace and defence giants Leonardo– Finmeccanica and Thales. Benefiting from over 35 years of industry experience, their UK operations, which include their ground control centre at Harwell, are headquartered in Luton. Telespazio VEGA, accessing the four satellites of the COSMO-SkyMed constellation, and Earth-i with the DMC3 / TripleSat constellation, will collectively be able to offer seven highly advanced and complementary imaging resources with multiple imaging opportunities each day.
 
Richard Blain, CEO of Earth-i, commented: “This agreement signed by both parties demonstrates a collaborative relationship between two geospatial companies who can now offer their customers the best of both worlds. By combining SAR and optical data we can provide ever more detailed metrics, analytics and information extraction. All of us look forward to working with our friends at Telespazio VEGA to find new and innovative applications and capabilities from our shared resources.”
 
Founded and run by prominent and experienced individuals from the Earth Observation industry, Earth-i is another success story from the UK Space industry along with its close neighbours and the satellites’ manufacturer, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). Earth-i is significantly increasing its imaging and data services from the DMC3 / TripleSat constellation and places specific focus on fast, easy and convenient access for data users.
 
Three identical 1 metre resolution optical satellites make up the DMC3 / TripleSat constellation. The unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution, along with industry-leading technical specifications, serve data users and support a wide range of applications in market sectors including oil and gas, security and defence, agriculture and construction.
 
Leveraging the inherent high revisit capability of the COSMO-SkyMed constellation, the collaboration with Earth-i will add a minimum of twice daily imaging over any location worldwide and with the advantage of a UK based ground station, it offers unprecedented levels of high assurance imaging regardless of weather conditions combined with much lower latency between acquisition in space and receipt on the ground to around 30 minutes in ideal circumstances.
 
The high frequency of the COSMO-SkyMed constellation makes it ideal for monitoring applications from wide area maritime surveillance and vessel detection to regional forestry and agricultural compliance applications, near real time flood mapping down to site specific sub-millimetre surface deformation monitoring of individual buildings, roads and bridges.