Space Shuttle Endeavour lit up the predawn sky above Florida’s Space
Coast on Monday February 7th with a launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space
Center.

Mr René Oosterlinck, ESA’s Director of the Galileo Programme and Navigation-related Activities, signed the first three contracts for the Galileo full operational capability phase. This event marks the start of building the Galileo operational infrastructure.

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.

After a major 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on 12 January, causing major casualties and damage the rescue teams needed new satellite high resolution maps, because such a powerful earthquake can make current maps suddenly out of date, causing additional challenges to rescue workers on the ground.

Antonio Tajani, European Commission Vice-President in charge of Transport, has announced the award of three of the six contracts for the procurement of Galileo’s initial operational capability.