Russian Arctic Under Satellite Control

Center of Space Monitoring of the Arctic Region was opened on 18th November at the Institute of the Information & Space Technologies of the Northern Arctic Federal University. The backbone of this centre is the national technology of Earth observation data reception and processing \"UniScan-36\", developed and manufactured by the ScanEx Research & Development Centre.

The Institute of the Information & Space Technologies held a ceremonial opening of the Center of Space Monitoring of the Arctic Region. Chairman of the Arkhangelsk Region Assembly Vitaly Fortygin, general director of ScanEx RDC Vladimir Gershenzon and rector of the Northern Arctic Federal University (NARFU) Elena Kudryashova have cut the symbolic ribbon.

The idea of creating a Center of Space Monitoring of the Arctic Region at the NARFU was conceived a month ago. It took one month only to open the Center and to have it up and running. According to the director of the NARFU's Center of Space Monitoring of the Arctic Region Sergei Koposov a wide range of tasks will be resolved based on this centre, such as: improvement of education programmes, scientific and research work, near real-time mode monitoring for the purposes of the national economy.

The UniScan receiver consists of the antenna system, installed on the roof of the 10th educational building of the NARFU, servers and software applications for reception, preliminary and in-depth processing of satellite images.

UniScan-36 complex was used to organise a direct reception of satellite data from different remote sensing satellites: Terra/Aqua, EROS B, RADARSAT-1/-2, and SPOT 5. The operations with optical and radar images of different resolution ensure the possibility to carry out monitoring of the ice situation in water areas, to organise information support and optimisation of ships navigation, to monitor the forestry, fishery, subsoil use, construction, etc. The footprint of the UniScan-36 station installed at the NARFU is 3,500 km in radius.

As of today, space monitoring centres have been created and have been functioning based on the UniScan technology at more than 15 higher education institutions of Russia. The possibilities of the Centre established in Arkhangelsk are much higher than those of the similar centres due to operations with a great variety of Earth remote sensing data.

NARFU nowadays is the only university in Russia, where a UniScan-36 complex is installed. All other higher education institutions operate UniScan-24 complexes.

A special guest of the opening ceremony at the Centre of Space monitoring of the Arctic Region was the Spot Image Sales Manager Bruno Bertolini (France). Spot Image is the operator of the SPOT 5 satellite, which data will be used in open access mode at NARFU.