Astrium’s Spanish expansion

Robert Hughes is an Australian critic and documentary maker. He has lived in New York for more than thirty years now, but his niece, Lucy Turnbull, was Lord Mayor of Sydney in 2003-4 (she, by the way, is married to Malcolm Turnbull, who was, until November 2007, the Minister for Environment and Water Resources in the government of John Howard; after Howard’s defeat in the 24 November 2007 federal election, Turnbull ran for the Liberal Party’s leadership, but narrowly lost to Brendan Nelson, the party’s current leader; Turnbull is now the shadow treasury minister). Hughes is best known for his 1987 book The Fatal Shore, which details the founding of Australia. We, and all others who love the city of Barcelona, believe his best book is Barcelona, which was published in 1992 (and in an abbreviated version in 2001). It is the definitive book on that wonderful city — indeed, a paean to the city which Hughes described as La gran encisera (the great enchantress).

Speaking of Barcelona: Astrium, an EADS company, has entered into a joint venture with the Barcelona-based Cartographic Institute of Catalonia (ICC), the Catalan official mapping agency, and Madrid-based space services provider Hisdesat. Sixty percent of the company will be held by Astrium, while ICC and Hisdesat each hold 20 percent of the shares. The joint venture, Infoterra Servicios de Geoinformacion SA (Infoterra SGSA), will form part of the Infoterra Group, a provider of geo-information products and services based on Earth observation data.

The company plans to develop global monitoring for environment and security (GMES) services, applications for agri-environment, defense, and security, and support international mapping projects. Using the joint resources, Infoterra SGSA also aims to develop datasets from airborne acquisition, as well as radar and optical satellite imagery. With offices in Madrid and Barcelona, Infoterra SGSA will be the exclusive distributor of TerraSAR-X high-resolution radar data for the Spanish market.

About TerraSAR-X

TerraSAR-X is an Earth observation satellite which uses an X-band SAR to provide high-quality topographic information for commercial and scientific applications. It was launched 15 June 2007 aboard a Dnepr rocket from Baikonur, and produced preliminary imagery on 19 June 2007. The project was a joint development of the German Aerospace Center, which contributed €100 million to the project, and EADS Astrium, which contributed €30 million. Infoterra holds the exclusive commercial exploitation rights.

The satellite works in the X-band — wavelength 31 mm, frequency 9.6 GHz — hence the name TerraSAR-X. The short wavelength makes the technical development a little more difficult but allows for high resolution of the digital radar images, up to one meter at the earth’s surface.