NOCTUA is the pilot project of a future commercial service for the collection, processing, analysis and distribution of monitoring data of the Lombardy territory, both with regard to buildings and infrastructures (urban areas, buildings, hospitals, schools, cultural heritage, bridges, viaducts, dams, etc.) and for the control of glaciers, mountain slopes, forests and natural resources in general. The data will be provided by a small satellite equipped with Synthetic Aperture Radar technology placed in orbit to demonstrate the ability to implement a dedicated low-cost, high-resolution and commercially available space segment.
The research and development activities carried out in the project will have three key objectives.
Firstly, to develop a space segment, consisting of a satellite platform plus SAR sensor, that is reliable, high-performance and low-cost. This objective will make the Earth observation service competitive on the market and allow scalability should the customer decide to operate a constellation of satellites based on the NOCTUA pilot.
Next, the implementation of a downstream segment based on the analysis of data provided by the SAR satellite and the derivation of information for infrastructure and land monitoring, as well as for emergency management.
This segment, strongly integrated with the space segment, for which it will have provided the requirements for use, will be accessible to institutional bodies, but also commercially to those who request it.
The ultimate goal is to integrate the two segments to provide an end-to-end service that is highly desirable to customers. The product would therefore be a spatial segment and a downstream segment strongly integrated with each other, modular and scalable, able to provide at low cost relevant information of territories and infrastructures. This objective influences
This objective largely influences the other two, as the commercial attractiveness of the project is the basis of its structure.
Mario Martina, Emma Schiavon, Marco Gaetani, Christian Salvatore, M. Mehdi Bateni, Beatrice Monteleone, Luigi Cesarini, Riccardo Giusti, Laura Teresa Massano, Serena Sapio, Maria Josè Jimenez Alvarado