This evening a Delta II rocket at Vandenberg is set to launch an Italian satellite that will be used by both military and civilian agencies for mapping. This is the second of four Italian mapping satellites that are planned for the Constellation of Small Satellites for Mediterranean basin Observation (COSMO).
The COSMO-2 was manufactured by Thales Alenia Space for the Italian Space Agency and the Italian Ministry of Defense. The first COSMO took off successfully in June 2007 from Vandenberg. The system will take radar imagery of the Earth using an X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument, with 5-meter spatial resolution.
The tight orbit of the satellite means that there’s an extremely small launch window of only one second per day. Weather and technical problems could delay the launch.
