COSMO-Skymed: An Italian infrastructure for the international earth observation community

The COSMO-SkyMed infrastructure is an Italian asset developed to satisfy the national dual user needs and to enhance the Earth Observation Community capabilities. The infrastructure is composed by the Space Segment, the Ground Segment and of the Integrated Logistic Support and Operations Segment. Rather than going into the deep technical description of the system capabilities, the aim of this paper is to provide the overall picture of the services available, from the user perspective, given by this Italian infrastructure, with particular reference to its evolution in the second generation. The system's overall space capacity relies on four Earth Observation SAR satellites belonging to the COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) first generation currently operating and the two COSMO-SkyMed di Seconda Generazione (COSMOSkyMed Second Generation) follow-on satellites, aimed at providing operational continuity to CSK with increased performance, flexibility and ability to respond to updated civilian and defence user needs.