Wideband GLOBAL Satcom Partnership: Radarsat Constellation Mission

The Canadian government hopes to adopt the U.S. Air Force’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) partnership model for Canada’s three-satellite Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) by asking other nations to add their spacecraft to improve RCM performance, Canadian defense officials said.

The effort has picked up steam since the Jan. 9 announcement by the Canadian government that it was funding RCM’s full development, launch and first year of operations, with the first of the three satellites to be launched in 2018.

“Our phone has rung a couple of times,” said Col. Andre Dupuis, director of space requirements at Canada’s National Defence Headquarters, when asked whether other nations have expressed interest in joining the RCM effort. He declined to be specific, but said the industrial component of any collaboration may prove more complicated than establishing the necessary bilateral relations with prospective contributing governments.

Addressing the Defence Geospatial Intelligence 2013 conference here organized by Worldwide Business Research, Dupuis said the performance of an RCM-based constellation of satellites would substantially improve if it grew to as many as six satellites in the same orbit to reduce the amount of time between flights over a given point on Earth.

WGS nations contributing to the purchase of additional satellites automatically receive pro rata access to the entire constellation. It is a model also used in Earth observation by the DMC International Imaging Ltd. of Britain, which manages a five-satellite optical-imaging constellation on behalf of contributors from Britain, China, Nigeria, Turkey, Spain and Algeria.

One of the more obvious candidates for a collaboration with Canada would be Germany, whose civil TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X radar satellites are in orbit and operated by Astrium Geo-Information Services of Europe in a partnership with the German Aerospace Center, DLR.

Astrium and DLR have been negotiating for months on a second-generation TerraSAR-X — the satellite was launched in 2007 and has a seven-year contracted design life — but thus far have not come to an agreement. Astrium had been scheduled to finance the second-generation system on its own, but has found the global market for radar imagery tougher to crack than forecast.

In a Jan. 24 briefing with journalists, DLR Chairman Johann-Dietrich Woerner said he expected DLR and Astrium to conclude their negotiations this year. Woerner said DLR is also looking for international partners on an L-band radar-imaging system, and that a decision here would also be made in 2013.

Woerner said he was in Canada when the government made the RCM announcement, and that he was “very happy” that the government is moving forward with the constellation.

Jean-Michel Darroy, director-general of Astrium Geo-Information Services, said the company’s radar sales improved in 2012, and that the commercial release of the WorldDEM product is coming in 2014. This will provide a global 3D digital elevation model based on stereo viewing of the globe by TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X, flying in close formation, one behind the other.