Sergey Samsonov - Canada Centre Remote Sensing (NRCan), Talk: RADARSAT Constellation Mission. Are you ready?

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites image the Earth in all weather conditions, day or night. Canada’s RADARSAT-2 satellite, launched in 2007, orbits the Earth with a 24-day revisit cycle. It is used for mapping ground deformation produced by natural and anthropogenic hazards; natural resource development; permafrost, glacier and coastal changes. The next generation of Canadian satellites, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), to be launched in June 2019, will improve the revisit cycle to four days, increasing the amount of data by a factor of six. In support of Government of Canada priorities, the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) has developed a system for automatic generation of standard and advanced deformation products from RCM SAR data. It is expected that this system will handle all GC deformation mapping processing requirements. Unlike RADARSAT-2, most RCM data will be made available to the end-user free of charge. Taking a lesson from the success of the European model of commercializing free data from the ESA Sentinel mission, the question remains whether the Canadian R&D community is fully prepared to exploit RCM data.