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21 Apr 2003

Alenia Spazio at LAD in Rio de Janeiro

Alenia Spazio, a Finmeccanica company, will be at the fourth edition
of the LAD - "Latin America Defentech" - exhibition, Rio de Janeiro,
22-25 April, 2003, at the Italian pavilion coordinated by ICE, AIAD
and SEGREDIFESA. 

The Italian company has been building satellites for
telecommunications and remote sensing for over 30 years and will be
presenting scale models of its Sicral, Atlantic Bird 1, Artemis and
COSMO - SkyMed programmes. 

Sicral is the first Italian system for military satellite
communications and was built by the SITAB consortium in which Alenia
Spazio was industrial leader. Sicral is a complex system made up the
satellite, the management and control centre at Vigna di Valle and
more than 100 user terminals for ground, sea and air platforms.

The architectural, engineering and technological solutions used in
developing Sicral make the programme one of undeniable strategic
value with a competitive and efficient performance able to meet all
the present and future needs of military telecommunications. Its
ability to adapt to even the most difficult conditions means that it
has already played a part in a number of actions linked to recent
international events. 

Atlantic Bird 1 is the first satellite for commercial
telecommunications developed entirely in Italy by Alenia Spazio as
prime contractor. 

From its orbital position at 12.5o West over the Atlantic Ocean, the
satellite permits the development of Internet connections, telephone
links and television broadcasting between Europe, the United States
and South America. State-of-the-art technologically and
internationally competitive, Atlantic Bird 1 has allowed the Italian
company to meet the new challenge of broadband telecommunications.
Moreover, thanks to an on-board satellite transponder, Atlantic Bird
1 is experimenting with multimedia services for digital television,
Web TV and Internet on high-speed trains. 

Artemis is a highly technological satellite that represents a major
step forward in creating an entirely European satellite navigation
system. Artemis also provides a mobile communications service with
contained costs, broad coverage and real-time transmission of data
from remote sensing satellites, like Envisat and Spot 4, directly to
the users anywhere in Europe and North Africa.

At LAD, Alenia Spazio will also be presenting the COSMO - SkyMed
constellation, an Italian Space Agency programme for Earth
observation. The constellation will monitor the Mediterranean area,
and could be extended worldwide, to provide useful information for a
number of applications thanks to the high resolution of the acquired
images, the reduced revisit times over the sites observed and the
speed with which the data will be made available to the users. The
main objectives of the system are monitoring national territory and
controlling natural disasters like floods and landslides; monitoring
coasts, seas and inland waters; agricultural monitoring to check on
crops and management of treatment cycles; cartography using high
resolution images in the order of one metre. Finally, the dual-use
(civilian and military) nature of the system will make other,
institutional, applications possible for the surveillance of the
national territory and strategic defence. COSMO - SkyMed will
therefore give Italy one of the most technologically advanced
observation systems in the world, guaranteeing greater safety and
improving living standards.

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