ELISA (ELectronic Intelligence by SAtellite) is a suite of four French military satellites launched on 17 December 2011 from Arianespace's Kourou spaceport in

French Guiana French Guiana, or Guyane in French, is an Overseas departments and regions of France, overseas department and region of France located on the northern coast of South America in the Guianas and the West Indies. Bordered by Suriname to the west ...

. It consists of microsatellites ELISA 1 (or ELISA W11, COSPAR ID: 2011-076A), ELISA 2 (or ELISA E12, COSPAR ID: 2011-076D), ELISA 3 (or ELISA W23, COSPAR ID: 2011-076C), and ELISA 4 (or ELISA E24, COSPAR ID: 2011-076B) The entire ELISA suite was launched on a single Soyuz ST-A

launch vehicle A launch vehicle is typically a rocket-powered vehicle designed to carry a payload (a crewed spacecraft or satellites) from Earth's surface or lower atmosphere to outer space. The most common form is the ballistic missile-shaped multistage ...

, along with Pléiades-1 and SSOT. The ELISA program is a demonstrator meant to pave the way for a planned Signals intelligence constellation called CERES. The ELISA satellites are in a

Low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

a few kilometers from each other to record

radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...

and

radio Radio is the technology of communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connec ...

transmissions. Since 2014, they have been used as a pre-operational system. The satellites are built around the Myriade microsatellite bus.

References

External links

* http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/elisa.htm * https://web.archive.org/web/20161018011750/https://elisa.cnes.fr/en/web/CNES-en/5940-elisa.php * http://www.arianespace.com/press-release/arianespace-vso2-mission-soyuz-sta-orbits-pleiades-1a-elisa-and-ssot/ Reconnaissance satellites of France Signals intelligence satellites Spacecraft launched in 2011 Spacecraft launched by Soyuz-2 rockets Satellite constellations Military equipment introduced in the 2010s {{France-spacecraft-stub

See also

References

External links