It is on January 20th 2014 in Hanoi, in the presence of Deputy Prime Minister Vietnamese Hoang Trung Hai and the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Johan Vande Lanotte, that SPACEBEL signed the contract for the supply to Vietnam of an Earth observation system “Made in Belgium” named VNREDSat-1b (Vietnam Natural Resources, Environment & Disaster Monitoring satellite). The satellite will be launched in 2017.
The industrial consortium under the leadership of SPACEBEL comprises several Belgian space companies:AMOS, QinetiQ Space, Deltatec, the Space Centre of Liege, and VITO, which will gather their skills to develop and validate the flight segment as well as the ground segment. The project also includes a training programme, in partnership with the University of Liège, and intended for the Vietnamese engineers in charge of the satellite data reception and analysis.
Based on ESA’s PROBA satellite platform, VNREDSat-1b will be placed in a Sun-synchronous orbit for a 5 year observation mission. It will allow Vietnam to strengthen its autonomy in the monitoring of phenomena such as deforestation, river and maritime pollution, flooding, agricultural and fishery activities, the effects of climate change, etc. With this information, the Vietnamese authorities will be able to better adapt their environmental management policy to the specific needs of the country. The contract amounts to more than 60 million Euros.
SPACEBEL is proud to work with the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) thus confirming our positioning on the Earth observation mini-satellite market.