Italy’s IRIDE Earth observation service went live on 1 July, opening initial access to imagery and analytics from one of the programme’s planned six satellite constellations for government users.
The operational phase officially began at 00:01 CEST on 1 July with the “IRIDE First Operational Tasking”, which included the acquisition of the programme’s first operational images. While ASI did not share details about these initial acquisitions, it did state that they “represent some of the application areas in which IRIDE will gradually be used, from civil protection and environmental monitoring to security, cultural heritage protection and international cooperation.”
A 1 July ASI press release said the first acquisition marked the beginning of the “progressive transfer of the IRIDE system from the European Space Agency (ESA) to ASI, owner of the national infrastructure.” The Italian government appointed ESA to implement the IRIDE programme under an agreement signed in December 2021.
The marketplace is currently open only to eligible Italian government users, while access to the registration portal appears to be restricted to Italian IP addresses. The registration process identifies three eligible user categories: civil protection, security and defence, and public administration. A notice on the registration page states that “commercial registration will be enabled in the future.”
Although access to the marketplace is currently restricted, its publicly accessible pages appear to indicate that only the HEO multispectral constellation is operational.
Once fully deployed, the €1.1 billion IRIDE initiative will comprise 68 satellites across six constellations. To date, ASI has only begun to deploy the multispectral HEO and Eaglet II constellations. Fifteen HEO satellites have been launched across three missions, and 16 Eaglet II satellites have been placed in orbit across a further two missions. According to the IRIDE marketplace website, one additional batch of satellites remains to be launched for each constellation. The remaining four constellations, for which no satellites have yet been launched, comprise a third multispectral constellation, two synthetic aperture radar constellations, and one hyperspectral constellation.
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