HELSINKI - ICEYE, a satellite technology company in Espoo, Finland, announced that it has been selected as a partner by the European Space Agency (ESA) to participate in the Civil Security from Space Program (CSS) to improve disaster and crisis management from the vantage point of space. This partnership aims to develop an advanced suite of natural catastrophe monitoring services.
Under the three-year partnership, ICEYE and ESA will collaborate on the Disaster Management from Space project to develop a comprehensive suite for effective natural catastrophe management, and an imaging service underpinned by ICEYE's fleet. The partnership will drive the evolution of ICEYE's hazard insights, while designing and testing the next-generation of Earth observation technology.
The CSS program is an ESA multi-disciplinary project started in November 2022 to advance the integration of Europe's competencies and assets into monitoring, mitigating and resolving civil security and crisis events. The CSS program fosters innovative concepts and solutions through collaboration between civil security stakeholders, participating states, and consortiums of users, service providers, and the space industry. These innovative ventures encompass research and development activities leading up to on-ground or in-orbit validation and testing. This project is the first ESA partnership with a Finnish prime and will be executed with the delegation support from Finland, Poland and Spain.
ICEYE has now deployed 27 satellites since 2018, including both commercially available and dedicated customer missions.
"I am delighted to sign the first ESA Partnership Project with ICEYE under the Civil Security from Space Program, supporting European efforts to use space to monitor, mitigate and resolve civil security and crisis events to keep people, infrastructures and resources safe on Earth," Josef Aschbacher, Director General of ESA, said. "We look forward to working with our Finnish partner on this project."
"This partnership is an opportunity to test the boundaries of natural catastrophe monitoring solutions, alongside ESA. The CSS program demonstrates ESA and the European Space Sector's commitment to building community resilience," said Rafal Modrzewski, CEO and Co-Founder at ICEYE. "We are proud to have been selected to participate in this program, and to be at the forefront of the new space-based crisis observation and management era."
