Alenia Spazio Display At Farnborough Show (July 22)
Alenia Spazio, a Finmeccanica company and leader in the space sector, is taking part again this year at the Farnborough Air Show, July 22-28, 2002.
At its holding company's exhibition area, the Italian company will be presenting, with scale models, three of its most important programs Galileo, Sicral and Cosmo-SkyMed programs that demonstrate how advanced technologies can make our world safer and more manageable, also in terms of transport and communications.
Within the European company Galileo Industries, Alenia Spazio is industrial leader for the Galileo program, the innovative European satellite navigation system.
Based on a constellation of 30 satellites in orbit 23,000 km above the Earth able to provide all vehicle types with their exact position and speed at any time, the program is destined to become a key element for the movement of vehicles, people and goods. Galileo will start the first services in 2006 to provide global (i.e. anywhere in the world) and multi-mode (i.e. for every category of transport) coverage for exclusively civilian applications. At the service of business and citizens, the satellite will be used widely and will be able to operate autonomously or with human assistance in several areas: agriculture and fishing, ecology, mobile communications and personal mobility. All this makes it one of the most innovative projects which is going to have important economic, industrial and employment repercussions in the near future, as well as improving the quality of life.
When fully operational in 2008, the European satellite navigation system will generate an annual turnover of some 10 billion euro compared with an estimated overall cost of between 3.2 and 3.4 billion euro (the equivalent of constructing 150 kilometers of motorway). Furthermore, the European Commission forecasts that Galileo will create 150 thousand new jobs.
At the British show, the company of the Finmeccanica group, active for over 30 years in the field of advanced telecommunications, will also present a 1:8 scale model of Sicral, the first national system of military telecommunications via satellite. Developed in a totally autonomous design by Alenia Spazio for the Sitab consortium, Sicral was launched in February 2001 from the Kourou Space Base in French Guyana. It is characterized by a capacity to adapt to even the most difficult operational conditions and its low running costs. Autonomy, mobility, safety, flexibility and inter-operability complete the picture, making Sicral a perfect defense network for land, sea and sky.
In the past months, Sicral has completed the operations for its definitive orbital insertion at 16,16o East, and has carried out link tests with the various types of user terminal. It is now fully operational and its ability to adapt to even the most difficult conditions has led to it being a major player in some actions related to recent international events and humanitarian peacekeeping missions.
COSMO-SkyMed is the radar component of the French-Italian Earth observation system COSMO SkyMed Pleiades, built by Alenia Spazio on behalf of the Italian Space Agency (ASI).
The system is a constellation of six satellites: four equipped with synthetic aperture radar operating in the X-band (9.6 GHz) and two with optical sensors operating in the different visible bands. It will monitor the Mediterranean area and the entire globe, providing useful information for a variety of applications thanks to the high resolution of the images acquired, the characteristic flexibility of radar and optical satellites, the reduced revisit times over the areas observed and the speed with which data becomes available. For example, the constellation will allow the control and analysis of agricultural crops; it will be useful in environmental monitoring by observing and checking on natural disasters, such as landslides, fires and floods, and controlling coastlines. Finally, COSMO-SkyMed will have an interesting use in drawing up high-resolution geographical maps.
