During the World Satellite Business Week (WSBW) held in Paris in September and organised by Euroconsult, the PanGeo Alliance officially welcomed its sixth member: ST Electronics, a company based in Singapore which is due to launch its first EO satellite, TeLEOS-1, within months.
The PanGeo Alliance is the first global alliance of Earth Observation satellite operators. Currently, the alliance members are: Aquila Space (US), Beijing Space Eye Innovation Technology (China), Dauria Aerospace (Russia), Deimos Imaging (Spain), Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (United Arab Emirates) and ST Electronics (Singapore).
The Alliance provides access to imagery and tasking opportunities from a unique and growing constellation of Earth Observation satellites, operated by its members. The constellation encompasses multispectral imagery in a range of resolutions (from 20 m to 75 cm per pixel), and a daily global imaging capability. All PanGeo Alliance members can provide access to the full products portfolio of the whole constellation. PanGeo multi-satellite mission planning gives customers access to imaging from all Alliance satellites as well as a connection to directly request tasked imagery from the operator. PanGeo coordinates the access to member data catalogues in a seamless way, integrating data visibility and ordering from the entire Alliance archive. Customers benefit from a global network of resellers and a unified access point to new tasking and archive imagery.
Every PanGeo Alliance member brings its unique capacity to the Alliance, contributing to the formation of a multi-capable and diverse constellation:
Aquila Space is a new, innovative company which currently operates two Perseus M satellites with Automatic Identification System (AIS) payloads. Starting in 2016, the company will deploy the Landmapper-BC and Landmapper-HD constellations, composed of multispectral satellites with daily and weekly capabilities of full Earth imaging, with spatial resolutions ranging from 22 m to 2.5 m.
Beijing Space Eye Innovation Technology (BSEI) is the worldwide distribtor of TH-1-01 and TH-1-02 satellites, which provide multispectral optical data at 2 m resolution. BSEI, one of the founding Alliance members, is the first Chinese commercial company introducing and marketing Chinese remote sensing satellite imagery products and services to the global market.
Dauria Aerospace is currently operating the AIS Dauria DX-1 satellite, and is currently developing its own constellation of EO satellites.
Deimos Imaging is a Spanish private company part of the UrtheCast group, and it operates two optical multispectral satellites: the Very High Resolution (VHR) Deimos-2 with a 75 cm spatial resolution and the medium resolution Deimos-1 satellite with 22 m resolution.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), headquertered in Dubai (UAE), owns and operates two optical multispectral satellite: the High Resolution (HR) DubaiSat-1 and the VHR DubaiSat-2 with a resolution of 2.5 m and 1.0 m respectively. MBRSC is scheduled to launch the 70-cm resolution KhalifaSat in 2017.
ST Electronics, the newcomer Alliance member, is scheduled to launch its first commercial Earth Observation satellite, the TeLEOS-1, in the last quarter of 2015. The satellite, which will provide panchromatic images with 1.0 m spatial resolution, will be launched into a near-equatorial orbit, in order to optimise the coverage of low-latitude areas, with an average revisit time of less than 16 hours.
Fig.1: The PanGeo logo depicting the Alliance six members
Fig.2: The current and future Earth Observation fleet of the PanGeo Alliance members
Fig.3: Case study image showing applications using PanGeo Alliance constellation data.