COSMO-SkyMed Mission: Applications and accomplishments

COSMO-SkyMed (COnstellation of small Satellites for the Mediterranean basin Observation) is an Earth Observation (EO) System based on a constellation of four X-SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites, completed by a geographically distributed Ground Segment (GS) infrastructure in charge of providing dual-use services to civilian and military end-users. The four satellites were launched within June 2007 and November 2010 and currently the constellation is fully operational. Main mission objective is the provision of data, products and services relevant to the: 1. environmental monitoring, surveillance, risk and emergency management applications of institutional entities; 2. environmental resources management, rapid mapping, maritime management, multi-temporal acquisition for agriculture monitoring, earth topographic mapping, ship detection, interferometry, landslides monitoring, law enforcement, informative/science applications of other institutional, scientific and commercial entities; 3. monitoring, security and intelligence applications of Defense entities. To achieve this goal, COSMO-SkyMed system supports different imaging modes whit different characteristic. COSMO-SkyMed mission has been pioneering the operational use of a spacecraft constellation of SAR sensors for Earth Observation and it is still demonstrating day by day the operational advantages coming from the constellation providing data and services to Defense and Civilian (scientific and commercial) Users. Among the institutional users there are international partners, national and international Administrations, Agencies, Research Centers, etc.. A evidence of the Italian leading role in the Earth Observation sector is represented by the number of the on-going international cooperations and agreements with: European Space Agency (ESA), Japan (ASI-JAXA cooperation), France (ASI-CNES agreement), Argentina (ASI-CONAE cooperation), Canada (joint Announcement of Opportunity ASI-CSA), USA (ASI-JPL projects). ASI manages either a number of owner projects such as Open Call , PMI, Announcement of Opportunity, etc. or several projects based on signi-cant national and international cooperations. In the international context, a significant example of cooperation is represented by the strong support provided by ASI to ESA (European Space Agency). After the end of operational life of the ENVISAT satellite, ESA requested support both to ASI and DLR (German Aerospace Center - Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) in order to complete the projects in the framework of Dragon 3 Programme. Starting from August 2013, ASI provided and it is still providing for free an amount of about 1000 COSMO-SkyMed scenes per year, as institutional support. In the national framework a number of agreements for the COSMO-SkyMed products exploitation are ongoing or are under definition or have been concluded. An example of ASI National institutional projects is MAP ITALY: based on specific needs of the Italian Premiership - Department of Civil Protection and on direct input by ASI Presidency, COSMO-SkyMed system activated a full interferometric mapping service of the whole National territory based on every-16 days Stripmap Himage acquisitions. Furthermore ASI is developing COSMO-SkyMed Seconda Generazione with aim to assure the X-band data continuity at least for the next decade, improving performance and functionalities of COSMO-SkyMed. This paper describes the current remote sensing capabilities of the COSMO-SkyMed mission showing briefly progresses and future directions and presents some of the results obtained in the last years by the utilization and application of COSMO-SkyMed data in the national and international context. © 2015, International Society for Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure, ISHMII. All rights reserved.