Following the decision taken in August by the CNES, the French Ministry of Economy, Finance and Recovery, to participate in the financing of the JAPETUS dual constellation demonstrator as part of the France Recovery Plan and by the European Union as part of NextGenerationEU ; The JAPETUS consortium partners, Safran Reosc, Leanspace, LAAS-CNRS and Prométhée, met in the presence of CNES to officially launch the Earth observation nanosatellite constellation demonstrator project.

A very high revisit and high-resolution constellation
The multiplication of areas of interest and the strong dynamics of the activities to be observed require faster observation frequencies. The Promethee nanosatellites, each weighing less than 50 kg, will be equipped with multispectral sensors developed by Safran Reosc, which will be the most compact of their generation; Leanspace will deploy a modular and agile ground infrastructure that will manage all operations. The LAAS-CNRS laboratory will develop the algorithms and software components to optimize and automate the operation of the future constellation.
With the 20 satellites of the future Japetus constellation, the areas to be monitored will be observed every 2 hours on average and up to every 45 minutes, an improvement of a factor of 10 compared to traditional space systems. Combined with onboard AI capabilities integrated with the ground-based data processing platform, Japetus will enable automatic monitoring of sites, borders and large areas up to several dozen times a day.
A hyper-reactive dual observation system for operational emergencies
Some situations require reactivity, and therefore alerts, in real-time. With an unprecedented inter-satellite connectivity with the Kineis constellation, Prométhée will allow its users to program its nanosatellites and receive priority and urgent alerts, in a few tens of minutes, from any point on the globe, whether in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or the Sahel, at any time of the day, without any heavy infrastructure: a simple ultra-portable terminal will be enough.
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