The Italian COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation constellation of two satellites (also referred to as COSMOSG or CSG), was launched on December 2019 from Kourou.
 

The COSMOSG mission was envisioned and planned by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), together with the Italian Ministry of Defence and the Italian space industry, joins the other four COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) first generation satellites already in orbit. 

The overall objective of the COSMO-SkyMed programme is global Earth observation and the relevant data exploitation for both civil applications (institutional, commercial) and defence activities.

The COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation is at the forefront of radar technologies and will ensure improvements and guarantee continuity with the first generation satellites, preserving the high quality and the highest precision features, both required for the interferometric activities.

With a true generational leap in terms of technology, performance and operational life of the system, the COSMOSG mission aims at improving the quality of the imaging service, providing the end users with enhanced capabilities in terms of higher number of images and image quality (larger swath and finer spatial and radiometric resolution) with respect to the current COSMO-SkyMed constellation.

The CSG requirements call for additional capabilities (e.g. full polarimetric SAR acquisition modes) granting a greater operative versatility, both in terms of programming capability and the effective sharing of the system resources among different typologies of users requesting images of different characteristics.

Within Italian COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation constellation of two satellites, Planetek has been responsible for the design and implementation of the following processing facilities:

Non-standard processors:

• PFMOS: Processor that takes in input CSG Level 1D (Ground Terrain Corrected) and DEM data to generate 1D and DEM Mosaicked products
• PFSPF: Processor that takes in input CSG Level 1B products to generate Speckle Filtered products
• PFCRP: Processor that takes in input CSG Level 1 standard and not standard products to generate Cropped products

Image Quality Assessment:

• PFQCA: Tool for CSG standard and not standard products quality control.

In the context of PFQCA tool developments, a new product, called spaceBIT, has been developed by Planetek, based on a plugin architecture and GPU based accelerators technology.

Read more about COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation:

• ASI Website
• ESA Earth Online
• Watch the first images collected by Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation over Milan, Wesenberg (Germany) and Iceland on Global Science website.