Telespazio, a Finmeccanica/Thales company, is to take part in the Farnborough International Airshow 2010 from 19 to 25 July. As one of the world’s leading operators in satellite services, Telespazio will be exhibiting both at the Finmeccanica Group stand and at the Italian Space Agency stand in the Space Pavilion.

At Farnborough, the company will present its main activities in space services, integrated communications, satellite navigation, scientific programmes and Earth observation. In addition, it will highlight its role in certain major space programmes, such as Galileo, COSMO-SkyMed, GMES, Sicral and Göktürk.

At the Finmeccanica stand, Telespazio will be operating a daily link-up with Italian forces in Afghanistan via the SICRAL satellite system. The SICRAL system, which has two satellites in orbit (launched in 2001 and 2009), is used for Italian military communications, and was designed, manufactured and launched into orbit by Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space.

On 7 May, the two companies signed a contract with the Italian defence ministry and the French defence procurement agency (DGA) to build Sicral 2 and the related ground segment. Sicral 2, which is to be launched in 2013, is a programme that has arisen out of co-operation between Italy and France which will strengthen the military satellite communications capacities already offered by Sicral 1 and 1B, and by the French Syracuse system. The new satellite will be partly financed by Telespazio, which (as was the case with Sicral 1B) will be able to use some of the satellite's capacity to offer communications services to NATO countries.

Telespazio will also demonstrate the geospatial services developed by its e-GEOS subsidiary (80% Telespazio, 20% Italian Space Agency) using very high resolution radar and optical data. These services will be aimed at the institutional and business markets (defence, industry, maritime surveillance, emergency management, agriculture and land registries) and can be viewed on innovative systems such as Google Earth Enterprise and Google Earth Portable.

e-GEOS markets data from COSMO-SkyMed, the Italian Space Agency/defence ministry constellation based on four satellites equipped with radar sensors that can operate night and day under any atmospheric weather conditions and with very short revisiting times. The first three COSMO-SkyMed satellites, which were launched in 2007 and 2008 (the fourth is scheduled for launch in October) are controlled from Telespazio’s Fucino Space Centre, while the data acquired by the satellites for civil applications is collected and processed by the Matera Space Centre.

Telespazio has a key role in the development of EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System) and Galileo, the European satellite navigation programme that should see the launch of 30 satellites. At the Fucino Space Centre, in Italy, Telespazio has built one of the control centres that will manage the satellites and system operations. The Galileo Control Centre (GCC) at Fucino, a 5,000 m2 facility that will be staffed by over 200 operators, will manage the navigation signals sent to the satellites and ensure a high quality service is provided to end users.

A second control centre has been built by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen (Munich). The operations management of the two centres has been assigned to Spaceopal, a joint venture between Telespazio and DLR, which will be responsible for providing the operations and logistics services needed for management and control of the satellite constellation, from the initial IOV (in-orbit validation) phase with the first four satellites (to be launched in 2011) until the system is fully operational.

Thanks to the extensive experience it has acquired in the telecommunications sector, Telespazio now develops and markets new services for satellite systems, as well as building and managing communications networks that integrate satellite and ground-based systems, with the aim of responding effectively to the needs of the business and institutional markets, media and broadcast sectors, and global telecommunications operators. At Farnborough, in particular, the company will be presenting its system for Inmarsat BGAN (broadband global area network) mobile communications, which provides broadband communications anywhere in the world as well as innovative solutions for the homeland security, telemedicine, e-government and distance learning sectors.


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