Argentina and Italy complete construction of the first Euro-American space constellation for emergency management

Alberto Fernández's Argentina has just placed in orbit the last piece of an Italian-Argentinean space project that dates back to July 2005, when Néstor Kirchner occupied the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires and Silvio Berlusconi resided in the Palazzo Chigi in Rome, the official seat of the Prime Minister.  

In the early hours of Monday 31 August, at 1:18 a.m. Spanish time, a Falcon 9 launcher belonging to the American company SpaceX-whose main shareholder is the magnate Elon Musk-launched from the Cape Canaveral space base (Florida state) and placed in orbit the Argentine radar satellite SAOCOM 1B, an acronym for Satellite for Earth Observation with Microwave Radar.

Exactly 14 minutes and 13 seconds after lift-off, the spacecraft of the great southern cone country has broken free from the rocket at an altitude of 609 kilometres, to position itself by its own momentum in its definitive orbital position at 620 kilometres, in the vicinity but on a different orbital plane than its twin brother SAOCOM 1A - in space since 8 October 2018 - and the four COSMO-SkyMed spacecraft controlled by Giuseppe Conte's coalition government.

The six satellites make up the so-called Italian-Argentine Satellite System for Emergency Management (SIASGE), the first European-American constellation of radar Earth observation. The whole system achieves an enormous width of vision over the Earth, allowing images of the same area to be repeated in just 12 hours. 

Its radars can see surface details even when the sky is cloudy or at night, which is very important for detecting oil spills at sea and for monitoring, managing and mitigating disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes or environmental disasters. 

The two Argentine mills look at the Earth with synthetic aperture radars or L-band SARs, which means that they emit 23-centimetre-wave microwave pulses that penetrate crop foliage and tree trunks, register the water on the ground and can determine, for example, the degree of humidity of important areas of land. With the ability to collect up to 225 radar images per day, they are particularly suitable for applications related to improving agriculture and water management.

In contrast, the four Italian COSMO-SkyMed use X-band radars - which means that they launch 3-centimetre-long microwave pulses - to observe the reflection of these pulses in the treetops, on the surface of the ground or on the ice, making them more suitable for security, defence and intelligence applications and, to a lesser extent, for environmental and agricultural work. The Spanish SAR radar satellite Paz of the operator Hisdesat, which was launched in February 2018 and has been in service since September of that year, also operates in X-band. Since then it has been providing images to official institutions, particularly the Ministry of Defence.

The electronic eyes of SAOCOM that look in X and those of COSMO-SkyMed that observe in L "see" very different things in different ways. These features make it possible to obtain a third catalogue of services, once the analysts on the ground have used sophisticated software to integrate the images and data from the two radar models. 

The National Commission on Space Activities (CONAE), the Argentine Space Agency that owns the satellite, will transfer the data obtained on soil moisture to the National Institute of Agricultural Technology to help Argentine farmers with the planting, fertilization and irrigation of soya, maize, sunflower and wheat, crops that generate about 40% of Argentine exports. They will also be used for phytosanitary control, in particular to combat wheat stem fusariosis, a disease caused by a fungus that arises during frequent rainfall and warm temperatures and ravages plantations.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) provided a ?54 million credit in August 2019 to finance the costs of completing the construction of SAOCOM 1B, launching it into space and updating the software to improve disaster risk management and agricultural production. According to IDB studies, the province and city of Buenos Aires account for more than 50% of the country's GDP, and flood-prone areas generate 30% of its contribution to the Gross Geographic Product. 

CONAE Executive Director Raul Kulichevsky has followed the take-off from Cape Kennedy. He led the group of 18 Argentine technicians who accompanied the satellite to the United States from INVAP's headquarters in Bariloche, Patagonia, the place where the SAOCOM mission was designed "by Argentines for Argentina," Kulichevsky said.

With a weight of 3 tons, the SAOCOM-1B is distinguished by its large radar antenna of 35 square meters that weighs 1.5 tons -half of the satellite- and consists of 7 laminar structures measuring 10 x 3.5 meters. Three solar panels supply electricity to the different equipment on board, which is housed in a central body in the form of a 4.7 x 1.2 metre box that holds the entire assembly.

The Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the company Telespazio have contributed to their manufacture and to the training of Argentine technicians; together with "80 Argentine companies and entities", according to official sources in Buenos Aires, such as Veng, the National University of Río Cuarto or the National Atomic Energy Commission, which developed the solar panels and the synthetic aperture radar antenna.

The launch of SAOCOM 1B was scheduled for mid-March, but the COVID-19 pandemic caused the United States to delay all the launches except those classified as being of national interest. After several cancellations, take-off was set for 31 August, after a secret Pentagon satellite was postponed owing to the occasional storms that hit Florida in the wake of Hurricane Laura.

The governments of Rome and Buenos Aires have planned a SIASGE II, which will comprise the second generation of Italian COSMO-SkyMed and Argentine SAOCOM 2 satellites. While the economic situation of Alberto Fernández's government calls into question the financing of new Argentine platforms, the first COSMO-SkyMed NG is already in orbit. It took off on 18 December 2019 from French Guiana, on the same flight as the CHEOPS scientific satellite built in Spain by Airbus for the European Space Agency (ESA).

The SAOCOM programme is not Argentina's first space initiative. The first Earth observation platform was the so-called Scientific Applications Satellite or SAC-C, which was launched in November 2000 from the US base in Vandenberg (California). Weighing 485 kilos, it carried three optical cameras and various equipment from the United States, Italy, Denmark, France and Brazil to provide real-time information and data on the whole of Argentina's territory and territorial waters and neighbouring countries.