COSMO-SkyMed: The dual-use component of a Geospatial system for environment and security

A new consciousness of national security is spreading worldwide, due to the imperative necessity to guarantee the safety of citizens and the integrity of strategic infrastructures and services, counteracting against hidden, less predictable, and lethal threats stemming from regional conflicts, organized crime, and terrorism. Also, security involves not only Defence, but also several civilian institutional entities, such as police forces, magistrate, civilian protection, coast guards, etc. These new political scenarii of multi-national cooperation require state-of-art technologies and global systems of surveillance and protection. The "need to see" has recently accelerated due to the consciousness of Earth environment degradation, and of space observation as a privileged asset to monitor and preserve National Security. Governments are investing in Earth Observation to face these problems, e.g. to maintain a strict surveillance on environmental changes, whose effects are interrelated on a world-wide scale, and to establish the limits of sustainable development compatible with ecosystems' fragile needs, and to monitor national territory and crisis areas to ensure citizens' security and safety. Italy is contributing to these commitments through the development of new technologically advanced systems, and the promotion of multi-national partnerships for Defence and homeland security. Within this framework, COSMO-SkyMed is the most important Italian initiative to put into space a constellation of four satellites each carrying a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instrument for Earth Observation devoted to both Defence and civilian utilization, with superior performances, operational versatility, and imaging quality. A fundamental step forward in this program has been achieved with the launch of the first COSMO-SkyMed satellite in June 2007, to which other three satellites will follow to form the final orbiting configuration by the end of 2008. A key feature of the COSMO-SkyMed system is the possibility to be easily integrated within a larger context of a multi-mission Geospatial System, made of different heterogeneous components. This constitutes from an utilization viewpoint a great advantage, for several good reasons. The first, the most important, is that the Customers normally require a global system performance, particularly referring to the system reactivity time. Another reason is the need of managing the whole system operations with the highest level of flexibility, in order to fulfil a multiplicity of User's needs, which may arise from different typologies of Users such as Defences, civilian, scientific Users. And finally, the necessity of correlating and fusing data and information produced by the different observation components, whenever deemed useful to augment User's situation awareness. This paper delineates how COSMO-SkyMed, viewed as a component of a larger Geospatial System, can characterize the dual use from Defence and Civilian, concerning specific integrated system capabilities and performances, according to resource sharing rules, and priorities established among different types of Users.