MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA) has obtained three contracts from the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency (MRSA) related to RADARSAT-2 satellite. The first contract refers to installing a ground station in 2016 for receiving and processing information captured by the satellite; the second to providing RADARSAT-2 data in advance of the station becoming operational; and the third to a training course in order to develop products to support several applications.
The aim of the MRSA with these contracts is to use the information gathered by the satellite for flood monitoring, maritime and agricultural monitoring, natural resource management, and in the development of digital elevation products.
RADARSAT-2 is an Earth Observation satellite launched by the Canadian Space Agency in 2007, equipped with a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) with multiple polarization modes that makes it possible to collect mass data with high precision, independently of weather or light conditions. It replaced the RADARSAT-1satellite whose mission ended in 2013. MDA has participated in the project as a prime contractor since the beginning.
The space artifact is used for a wide range of applications, including sea ice mapping and ship routing, iceberg detection, agricultural crop monitoring, marine surveillance for ship and pollution detection, terrestrial defence surveillance and target identification, geological mapping, mine monitoring, land use mapping, wetlands mapping and topographic mapping.
