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TAMPA, Fla. — Belgium’s Simera Sense has won a contract to provide multispectral imagers for a small constellation being designed to track wildfires, volcanic activity and other regional priorities for the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain.
The company said July 7 it is building eight MultiScape100 sensors for Telespazio’s Spanish subsidiary, which recently won 21.3 million euros ($24.4 million) from the local island government to be prime contractor for the Earth observation constellation.
Each of the first two 80-kilogram satellites would house three imagers and the third would have the remaining two, with the trio slated to fly together to low Earth orbit in the second half of 2028.
The full constellation, scheduled to move into an operational and commercial data exploitation phase between 2029 and 2031, aims to provide near-daily coverage of the Spanish archipelago.
“This program demonstrates how advanced Earth observation capabilities can be placed directly in the hands of regional decision-makers,” Simera Sense chief commercial officer Thys Cronje said.
More than 10 MultiScape100 imagers have launched on satellites to date and all are performing well in orbit, according to Cronje.
These include Hancom InSpace’s Sejong-1 and Sejong-2 satellites, ISISpace’s NAPA-2 and the Phisat-2 and Platero spacecraft operated by Open Cosmos.
“The MultiScape100 was designed to deliver high-quality multispectral imagery from compact satellite platforms, and the Canary Islands Constellation is an excellent example of how these capabilities can help governments and organizations make faster, better-informed decisions to protect communities, infrastructure, and natural resources,” he added.
Unlike pan-European Earth observation systems that must balance the needs of many countries and a wide range of priorities, the Canary Constellation would be optimized specifically for the environmental and operational challenges facing the islands.
However, the constellation would also image other regions of the world, creating opportunities to commercialize data internationally while developing highly skilled jobs to support the islands’ local aerospace industry.
Spain’s AVS (Added Value Solutions) is building the satellites based on its LUR-50 platform.
An initial technology demonstrator is slated to fly in the second half of 2027, ahead of the three operational spacecraft, to validate the satellite platform, payload and end-to-end data processing chain.