Portugal Space news - The UK joins Portugal and Spain in the Atlantic Constellation. UK Space has announced that the data access and provision policies for members of the Atlantic Constellation will shortly be established jointly with Portugal and Spain.
The UK has just announced that they will join Portugal in the Atlantic Constellation and will contribute with a new pathfinder satellite that will be launched from Portugal. The UK Space Agency will invest £ 3 million to build a new pathfinder satellite that will be part of the Atlantic Constellation, with co-funding from Open Cosmos. Open Cosmos, that has recently added to its Open Constellation two satellite missions which were successfully launched on November 11, 2023, has recently raised $ 50 million in Series B funding.
The UK Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Andrew Griffith stated that “by working with Open Cosmos on a new satellite and supporting our Atlantic partners, Spain and Portugal, we can harness space tech for our shared goals, while creating new skills, opportunities and jobs for the future to grow the UK economy.”
The UK will be joining the Atlantic Constellation with Portugal and Spain in order to further strengthen national capabilities in Earth observation technology and to contribute both to the EU Copernicus program and to the European Space Agency. The new satellite that will be built in the UK will provide innovative Earth and coastal monitoring as well as data sharing for the Atlantic Constellation network.
What is the Atlantic Constellation?
The Atlantic Constellation of satellites is a flagship project developed by the Atlantic International Research Centre (AIR Centre) in collaboration with Mexico, the UK, Spain, Nigeria, South Africa, Norway, Egypt, Brazil, and Canada.
In Europe, the Atlantic Constellation initially included an MoU between Portugal and Spain, but the UK has announced in November 2023 that they will join the two countries. The new collaboration will include a satellite built in the UK that will be of the same design and launched in the same orbital plane as 3 others from Portugal, thus constituting the first batch of satellites in the Atlantic constellation. The UK’s pathfinder satellite contribution to the Atlantic Constellation aims at increasing the frequency of the revisit time in the first orbital plane by 33%, meaning more observations can be made of the same point on Earth.
The Atlantic Constellation will launch into space a constellation of satellites for the observation of the Earth and oceans for Ocean, Earth, and Climate monitoring. Portugal’s 2030 Space Strategy includes the Azores International Satellite Launch Programme and private companies including GEOSAT that is the first Portuguese operator of observation satellites.
According to Morgan Stanley, the global Space Economy could generate revenue of more than $ 1 trillion by 2040. In the short term, the Space sector will have an impact on IT and telecommunications, since Morgan Stanley has projected that satellite broadband will represent between 50% - 70% of growth in the global Space Economy by 2040, and that this will contribute to driving down costs.
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