Demonstration of ORCA Constellation Services Phase 2

In 2039 a fleet of 48 400 planes is expected to be used. The ESA-supported DOCS-2 project plans to use commercial airliners as a platform carrying small remote-sensing equipment, which would image the ground as the planes travel on their regular routes.

The ORCA (Optical and Rf Constellations on Airplanes) project plans to use commercial airliners as a platform carrying small remote-sensing equipment, which would image the ground as the planes travel on their regular routes. A constellation of such payloads, hitching a ride on the thousands of aircraft flights crossing the continents every day, would provide coverage and revisit frequencies not possible with current satellite-based systems and at the fraction of the cost. The pilot project is the first step towards ORCA’s commercial deployment, which will enable a whole new range of applications such as affordable infrastructure monitoring, resource management, detailed monitoring of the environment and the atmosphere or forest fires monitoring. The ORCA system uses GNSS and Satellite Communications services, as well as EO ground segment (image processing, handling tec.) technologies. ORCA uses and enhances space-based earth observation data and complements the spectrally rich Sentinels with a fast revisit constellation and additional capabilities.