MDA Space unveiled a three-tier software portfolio Wednesday that lets customers search its Earth observation archive, schedule new satellite imagery and, at the top tier, pull the data straight into their own ground stations.
MDA made the announcement at the World Space Business Week conference in Paris, ahead of the late-2026 launch of its three-satellite CHORUS constellation. Two new spacecraft — a C-band satellite built by MDA and an X-band satellite supplied by Finland’s ICEYE — will join RADARSAT-2, the company’s radar imaging satellite already in orbit.
The base tier, CHORUS Command, handles archive searches and acquisition scheduling. CHORUS Command Pro, the premium tier, goes further: it installs a CHORUS regional ground station inside a customer’s own operations, giving it a direct downlink and near-real-time local processing instead of waiting on MDA’s infrastructure. MDA says that kind of independence is what its defence and critical-infrastructure customers are asking for.
The third tier, CHORUS Intelligence, turns the satellites’ radar images and telemetry into finished products: vessel detection, oil-on-water tracking, ground deformation and energy-infrastructure monitoring.
“Earth observation at MDA Space has always meant more than building world-class spacecraft. We have spent decades turning synthetic aperture radar data into intelligence products for maritime, defence and critical infrastructure monitoring,” said Mike Greenley, chief executive officer of MDA Space. “With this new expanded MDA CHORUS product line, we have taken that same heritage and built it into a user-friendly and complete product system that customers can directly access, task, and grow with.”
The announcement follows the August opening of the CHORUS control centre in St-Bruno-de-Montarville, Quebec, near the Canadian Space Agency’s headquarters. The facility will handle command, control and mission assurance for the constellation once it is in orbit.
MDA said in May it had signed nine CHORUS customers and collected 32 more letters of interest, spread across North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Commercial operations are anticipated to begin in early 2027.