The Capability of COSMO-SkyMed Di Seconda Generazione to Support Cooperation Scenarios with Other Earth Observation Systems

“COSMO-SkyMed di Seconda Generazione” (CSG) is the Italian end-to-end satellite system for Earth Observation (EO) conceived for both a civilian and a defence use. It has the twofold objective of ensuring operational continuity to the current constellation (COSMO-SkyMed - CSK), while improving functionality and performances. In particular, the CSG System will achieve an improvement of the CSK Interoperability, Expandability and Multi-Mission/Multi-Sensor (IEM) key principles, aimed at supporting cooperation scenarios between CSG and other EO systems. The IEM has been conceived to provide native capabilities to COSMO to be an “open” system in a broad sense: 1. Capability to expand itself by replicating its parts/components (e.g. add another user ground center geographically distributed) 2. Capability to expand its performances (e.g. number of processed data), replicating its components (e.g. processing chain) 3. Capability to interoperate with other systems at different levels, ranging from the simple request of a generic service until accessing to the partner’s database and/or inner services according to the Interoperability protocol stack 4. Capability to export functional H/W and S/W aggregates to be installed in a partner system providing it with set of COSMO SkyMed capabilities and vice-versa to import foreign components to be installed into COSMO-SkyMed in order to acquire partner’s multi-mission capabilities 5. Capability to manage foreign missions, thanks to the ability to manage them from the same Man To Machine Interface, which has been conceived with different windows, each one related to a specific mission, and cross-related functionalities to manage the different mission at a certain integrated level 6. Capability to convert around 16 different mission’s products in its internal data base format (HDF5) in order to create a multi-mission database and related catalogue. It is worth to be noted that, the cooperation with other EO systems comes from two major cooperation paradigms called Cooperation by Federation and Cooperation by Expansion. Cooperation by Federation means that the cooperation is granted through exchange of services according to agreed interfaces / protocols. The Federation does not require integration of physical components. This kind of integration provides the possibility of accessing the catalogue of Partner’s EO systems, searching for given products, ordering them, and receiving the queried products. Reciprocally, CSG allows the same type of access to Partner’s EO systems. (points 3,5,6) The Cooperation by Expansion between two EO systems is achieved by exchanging hardware and software components (points 1,2,4). Such capabilities have been further improved in the second generation, to cope with actual cooperation come up in the meanwhile in the defence domain such as MUSIS and OPTSAT 3000. The aim of this paper is to describe both the IEM capabilities already consolidated in the frame of the first generation and the enhancements under development in the CSG context necessary to comply to such cooperation.