EADS Astrium Awarded Korea’s First Geostationary Multi-functional Satellite Contract

SEOUL, May 18, 2005/Satnews Daily/ ― EADS Astrium has been awarded a contract from the Korea Aerospace and Research Institute (KARI) to design and manufacture the first Korean multi-function geostationary satellite “COMS”.

EADS Astrium said the highly advanced COMS satellite has three payloads -- one for meteorology, one for ocean observation and one for communications. COMS will provide meteorology data to end-users around the globe, oceanography data for the Korean peninsula and experimental communications services in Ka-band, all from its orbital locations 116º and 138° East.

COMS will be the third Earth observation spacecraft designed and manufactured for the Asia-Pacific region by EADS Astrium.

As prime contractor for COMS, EADS Astrium will be responsible for the design and build of the satellite including both the meteorology and ocean imagers - the communications payload will be provided by KARI in Korea, as a Customer Furnished Equipment.

According to EADS Astrium, COMS will provides continuous image monitoring with the extraction of high resolution meteorological data from its multi-spectral imager. It will give early warning of hazardous weather conditions including storms, floods, sandstorms, etc and provide data on the long-term changes in sea surface temperatures and cloud patterns. Earth observation data from COMS will be relayed to a processing station. Once processed, the data will be resent via the COMS satellite to weather forecasters, Earth observation centres etc around the world.

COMS will also carry an Ocean Imager to monitor marine environments around the Korean peninsula and provide data (on chlorophyll etc) to assist the fishing industry in the region. It will also monitor both long and short-term changes to the marine ecosystem.

The communications payload on-board COMS will allow “in-orbit verification” of advanced communication technologies and will support experiments covering wide-band multi-media communication services.

The spacecraft will have a launch mass of 2.4 tons and a spacecraft power of 2.5kW at end of life. The satellite, operating from geostationary orbit, will provide services for a minimum of seven years. COMS is primarily based on EADS Astrium’s Eurostar E3000 spacecraft platform.

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