Radarsat Constellation Mission:Update and Collabration Activities with SENTINEL-1
Iris, Steve1; Flett, Dean1; Carrier, Alain1; Potin, Pierre2
1Canadian Space Agency, CANADA; 2European Space Agency, ITALY

The number of applications using radar satellite imagery has been significantly growing over the past several years. Very active in this field for more than two decades, Canada and Europe continue to maintain leadership in C-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar systems. The demand for Earth observation data to support operational monitoring applications, particularly in the maritime domain, requires maintaining an operational satellite capability to ensure data continuity with the past/current missions and an uninterrupted supply of critical data to decision makers. To meet these needs, the European and Canadian space agencies (ESA and CSA) plan to launch, respectively, the Sentinel-1 mission and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) within the next years. The long and successful collaboration between the two agencies as well as complementary radar technologies currently in development naturally led to the establishment of an exchange mechanism to explore and maximize the potential synergy between the two missions for the benefit of users.

This presentation aims to mainly provide up-to-date information on the RCM mission development and to describe the main characteristic of the system. We will also present the collaborative activities implemented between the CSA and ESA with the aim to maximize the potential offered by their respective systems. This cooperation and synergy could provide several benefits to the users in terms of improving coverage of user’s areas of interest, reducing latencies, providing complementary data/modes, and alleviating potential data acquisition conflicts.