December 3, 2020 – Thales Alenia Space has signed a 482 Meuro contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to build the Copernicus Radar Observation System for Europe in L-band (ROSE-L) environmental monitoring satellite, as part of Europe’s Copernicus program, the first tranche being 90 Meuro. Copernicus is an Earth observation program led by the European Commission with the European Space Agency ESA coordinating and managing the Space component. It provides for the Sentinel satellites series and Earth observation data for environmental protection, climate monitoring, natural disaster assessment and other social tasks. Thales Alenia Space will serve as prime contractor for this program with Airbus Defence and Space as main partner for the radar instrument. This mission responds to the requirements expressed by both the Land Monitoring and the Emergency Management services. Its target applications are: soil moisture, land cover mapping, crop type and status discrimination, forest type/forest cover (in support to biomass estimation), food security and precision farming, maritime surveillance and natural and anthropogenic hazards. In addition, the mission will contribute to the operational monitoring of the cryosphere and polar regions including sea ice mapping and land ice monitoring. Other emerging applications will be possible by the synergetic and complementary observations with C-band and X-band SAR systems.