Tomorrow, Sunday February 18 at 3:17 pm Spanish time, SpaceX is scheduled to take off from Vandenberg Air Base in California. It will launch a Falcon 9, which will put into orbit the satellite 'Paz' designed by the Spanish government through Hidesat, a Spanish private communications company that also serves the Ministry of Defense since 2001.
From the beginning it has been considered as a spy satellite, although it will also have scientific and civil applications. It is part of the 'National Earth Observation Program' approved in July 2007, and with it Spain will join the select group of countries with autonomous capacity to observe the earth. It has been built by Airbus Defense and Space, will be operated by Hidesat, and has several systems for military, scientific and commercial applications.
Fifteen daily orbits and three image modes
Paz is a hexagonal satellite of 1,450 kg, 5 meters long, and a cost of 160 million euros. It will be placed in low Earth orbit, about 514 kilometers high, and its main instrument is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR). With it, he will map the earth in three dimensions, and he will be one of the first to combine this data with a sophisticated Automatic Identification System (AIS), which will allow him to make the best possible monitoring of the world maritime environment.
The satellite will carry out its mission for five and a half years. In that time, it will make 15 orbits a day around the earth, with which it will cover an area of more than 300,000 square kilometers at a speed of seven kilometers per second, obtaining 100 very high resolution images every 24 hours.
These images can be done independently of the weather conditions, both day and night, and will allow surveillance and mapping operations in three different ways. On the one hand, there will be a Stripmap mode with images of 50x30 km and up to 3 meters resolution, a Spotlight with 5x5 and 10x10 kilometers with one meter resolution, and Scansar with images of 150x100 km and up to 18 meters.
Paz will also take an experiment developed by a team from the Institute of Science of the Space (IEEC-CSIC), and with which, for the first time, the hiding of radiofrequency signals in their two polarizations will be measured. Its final objective will be to improve predictions of atmospheric behaviors, such as rainfall and floods, and have more time to take the necessary measures to avoid possible disasters that may cause.
For this, the experiment will allow to see how GPS signals are hidden when passing through the atmosphere. By doing so, the changes in the signal produced by the atmospheric phenomena themselves will be analyzed. They will mainly measure the extreme rains that occur in the context of climate change, which will allow you to obtain data that will be very valuable to be able to make better climate models for the extreme phenomena that will increasingly occur more frequently.
In the future, Paz will be joined by a second satellite called Ingenio, which will complement its information by obtaining optical images. When both projects were presented in 2007, both were expected to be operational in space by 2012. However, after numerous delays, Paz had to wait until 2018 to be launched, and Ingenio still has no definitive date for its launch, although it is expected to be during 2019.
A valuable instrument for border control
From the moment the project was presented, almost all media began to refer to it as the first Spanish spy satellite. However, already in a 2007 interview, its managers tried to avoid that term, preferring to use a more generic one as an "observation satellite" due to its other applications.
Among the benefits to which they pointed since then, are achieving greater efficiency in the valuation of natural resources, more rapid response to disasters, and better planning of infrastructures and spatial planning. Of course, they also admitted that it would be "a very valuable instrument for the control of our borders" or the security of the troops abroad.
"It is true that the Industria satellite (Ingenio) will be oriented towards civil users and ours will focus more on national security and defense issues, but there are environmental problems, such as marine dumping, that only the satellite Radio can detect, "said the then Secretary of State, Soledad López.
As for the name, it is called Peace because the Ministry of Defense wanted a feminine name and that it reflected "in an obvious way for the whole world" its primary objective, that of guaranteeing national security and defense.
In any case, for all this to be possible, the satellite will first have to be launched. Initially, the launch was to be carried out by the Russian company Kosmotras, but after its delays Hidesat canceled the agreement with it in 2016, and in March 2017 it reached an agreement with SpaceX to take charge of the launch.
You can see the live launch
For those who want to see the launch of the satellite, Space X will enable a live video to watch it streaming from YouTube. With it you can see how the ninth Falcon 9 reused by Space X takes off.
Along with the Spanish satellite, SpaceX is also expected to launch the first two test satellites for the worldwide broadband network prepared by Elon Musk: Starlink. It is a satellite internet project with gigabit speed presented three years ago, and with which it would be able to provide internet to everyone at low cost. Those of tomorrow will be only 2 of the 4,425 satellites that want to launch with this project.