MDA announces CHORUS™ as the name of its next market-leading commercial Earth Observation mission

MDA Ltd has announced at the World Satellite Business Week event that its next generation commercial Earth observation (EO) mission will be named CHORUS. The company also announced that CHORUS will initially include C-band and X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites.

A collaborative multi-sensor constellation, CHORUS will bring together multiple diverse and unique perspectives in harmony, opening the aperture and the art of the possible to provide a new level of real-time insight about our planet. CHORUS builds on the strong heritage of the RADARSAT program and brings forward innovative new technologies and operations concepts to deliver a significantly enhanced capability.

The powerful C-band SAR satellite will provide broad area coverage in concert with a smaller trailing X-band SAR satellite for higher resolution data collection and Near Real-Time (NRT) cross-cueing day or night and in all weather conditions. The X-band satellite will fly in the same mid-inclination orbit with the identical ground track as the MDA-built C-band SAR satellite.

By collecting and integrating data from the individual satellites, CHORUS will provide the most extensive radar imaging capacity available on the market in one system, ranging from industry leading broad area coverage with a 700km-wide swath to sub-metre very high resolution spotlight images.

In keeping with RADARSAT heritage, CHORUS will showcase unique capability for maritime surveillance and other time-critical applications, such as land intelligence and disaster response. This NRT capability will be enabled through fast-tasking for tactical operations and direct downlinks to a global network of cloud-enabled ground stations.

https://mda.space/en/