MDA Awarded Contract for the Arctic Observing Mission

Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) announced on July 31 that MDA has won an award to conduct a study on the feasibility and value of the Arctic Observing Mission (AOM). The award was for $2.5M and will last until the end of 2024. (The listing said that award was given in May and has a publication date of June 22nd, but PSPC’s site said that it has received its final amendment as of July 31st.) As reported earlier in SpaceQ, the study will be about the feasibility and socio-economic benefits of the AOM, as well as to “refine the mission design for [the AOM] and provide substantiated cost estimates,” according to the original tender notice. The AOM is intended as a way to provide higher-quality atmospheric, climate, and weather monitoring for the Arctic than is currently available using currently-existing constellations. It is a followup to the earlier Phase 0 study called the Atmospheric Imaging Mission for Northern Regions (AIM-North), as well as the Polar Communications and Weather Mission that outlined the issues that the AOM is intended to solve. Geosynchronous satellites in equatorial orbits can watch a given region for a longer period of time, but the imagery that they capture from latitudes higher than 60° is often unusable. Satellites in polar orbits, especially those in low Earth orbit (LEO), can capture imagery of the North, but aren’t able to linger over the region for long, creating gaps in the data. AOM would solve this by using a constellation of two satellites in a so-called Highly Elliptical Orbit (HEO), with its apogee over the Arctic and its perigee over Antarctica. As each satellite moves away from Earth and gets closer to the orbital apogee, it slows down, creating a comparatively long linger time over the Arctic, allowing for higher-quality and longer-period imagery. Arctic Observing Mission infographic. Image credit: Canadian Space Agency. The AOM is a joint proposed project of the Canadian Space Agency and the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). In a comment to SpaceQ, a CSA representative said that they are also “working with potential international partners in the United States and Europe to determine how they could contribute to AOM.” In a recent video presentation on AOM, CSA mission scientist Konstantin Baibakov pointed to four proposed payloads: an Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), a greenhouse gas imaging Fourier transform spectrometer, A dispersive spectrometer for air quality observations, and space weather measurement devices. The CSA’s site on the AOM points to climate- and permafrost-tracking as key goals of the proposed constellation. Baibakov also pointed to its potential usefulness for weather forecasting, however. He said that geosynchronous satellites are a key source for “nowcasting guidance” (ie short-term weather forecasting), and are particularly important in generating alerts for dangerous weather phenomena. The AOM would be able to perform the same duties in latitudes north of 40°, potentially serving as a key safety resource for Northern and Indigenous communities. Baibakov also emphasized that this is still very early in the constellations’ potential development, and that he didn’t expect launch before 2034. Much will depend on the next 19 months, as MDA conducts their study and reports their findings.