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teams needed new satellite high resolution maps, because such a powerful earthquake can make current maps suddenly out of date, causing additional challenges to rescue workers on the ground.

On December 24, 1979, the member states of the European Space Agency (ESA), for the first time,  launched their own rocket into space – the foundation stone of the extraordinary success story of the Ariane launcher system.

Paris –  At the Paris headquarters of the French space agency (CNES), Simonetta Di Pippo, ESA Director of Human Spaceflight, and Thierry Duquesne, CNES Director for Strategy, Programmes and International Relations, signed an agreement that paves the way for the launch of a high-accuracy atomic clock to be attached to the outside of the European Columbus laboratory onboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Bejing – China launched last week a remote-sensing satellite, “Yaogan VII,” from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern Gansu Province.

Government representatives from around the world gathered at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, 7–18 December, to negotiate a deal to restrict emissions of heat-trapping gases that drive climate change.
Also ESA is attending the conference – also known as COP15 as it will be the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – to present how satellites are playing an important role in observing the many aspects of our ever-changing planet.

Cannes, France – Thales Alenia Space has delivered the second flight model high-resolution (HR) optical imaging instrument for integration, testing and validation in the Pleiades earth observation satellite in construction at Astrium facilities in Toulouse.

 
Cannes, France – Thales Alenia Space reports that the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) spacecraft, developed and built by Thales Alenia Space for the European Space Agency (ESA), has completed its in-orbit commissioning and calibration phase, by successfully passing an in-flight test review last week.

The second satellite in ESA’s Earth Explorer series – the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission – and the second demonstration satellite under ESA’s Project for Onboard Autonomy (Proba-2) were launched into orbit last night from northern Russia.

At the conference on ‘The Ambitions of Europe in Space’, which was held on october  in Brussels, the GMES initiative was presented as a programme of fundamental importance for Europe’s future.