South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria, Kenya team up to work on pan-African satellite constellation

South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria and Kenya are collaborating to work on the development of a pan-African satellite constellation at the South African Space Agency.

The pan-African satellite constellation called the pan-African satellite constellation (ARMC) has come to an agreement to launch one satellite each to form a constellation of four Earth observation (EO) satellites in space with the same payloads, providing coverage and data for the management of resources in Africa.

South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria and Kenya agreed on the roadmap including specifications of the project in 2009 after the introduction of the idea of ARMC in 2002 at Addis Ababa. In the capital of Addis Ababa, the experts agreed that resource management was an alternative to disaster management in Africa. After the success of the User Requirements Consultations in 2003, Nigeria and Algeria initiated membership in 2004, whereas South Africa and Kenya joined the partnership in the following year.

Nigeria successfully launched the NigeriaSat-2 Earth observation in 2011 for constellation, while South Africa is giving her effort to launch EO-Sat1 by 2021 and Algeria is firming her ground to launch Alsat-3 in 2020.

South African Space Agency (SANSA) engineers are working on a central data tube that will contain the collective knowledge of the four partner agencies, ahead of a new ARMC kick-off meeting involving the heads of the space agencies, to be hosted by SANSA later in this year.

"When I took over the agency, one of the things I thought was necessary, from a continental perspective, was to bring that constellation back to life. The whole idea is to have a set of satellites in a constellation around the earth that will help us access the continent's resources," Val Munsami, the Chief Executive Officer of SANSA said.