The Canadian government will hold an Industry Day on November 13 to kick start a procurement process for Polar Epsilon 2 (PE2) capabilities, which involve plans to develop ground infrastructure to collect and process data from the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM).
In a Request for Information (RFI) notice posted last week, the government said it was “seeking to engage industry in a consultation process for the refinement of the procurement strategy, along with the proposed delivery solution.” The RFI was also an effort to gauge industry interest in the program.
The Polar Epsilon project was initially set up by National Defence to exploit information from Canada’s RADARSAT-2 satellite. PE2 will exploit data from the RCM satellites that are currently being designed by the Canadian Space Agency to replace RADARSAT-2, with a planned launch in 2018.
The plan is to establish infrastructure to permit collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination of RCM Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Automated Identification System (AIS) data and includes “the data reception antennas, the SAR data processor, the AIS data processing service, telecommunications hardware, data exploitation software, and data links between multiple stakeholders’ facilities.”
The government says the project “will enhance maritime surveillance by providing detection, classification, and identification of seagoing surface vessels, with increased revisit frequencies over that currently provided by the RADARSAT-2 satellite.”
Although the PE2 will not repurpose or reuse any components of the current system, it will be installed at the current locations, primarily Aldergrove, BC and Masstown, NS.