French-Italian aerospace
manufacturer Thales Alenia Space on Tuesday signed a contract
worth more than 400 million euros to build two satellites for
the European Space Agency's (ESA) Copernicus observation
programme.
The new satellites to be built, called Sentinel 1C and 1D,
are part of the first family of satellites in the programme,
which are specialised in radar observation. Sentinel 1A has been
in orbit since 2014 and Sentinel 1B will be launched in April.
Sentinel 1C is due to be finished in December 2020 and 1D
is scheduled for 2021.
The data generated by the satellites in the programme
include information on forests, glaciers, seas and coasts and
can be used for various purposes such as farming and controlling
maritime traffic, as well as studying the climate.
So far more than 15,000 users have registered on the
Sentinels scientific data hub, 2.5 million products have been
downloaded - corresponding to 3 million GB of data - and 350,000
products are available online for download, ESA said on its
website.
The latest two satellites are going to be fully financed by
the European Commission, said the commission's Mauro Facchini
during the contract signing in Rome.
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