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News  Artemis assists emergency services to fight Portuguese fires
Fire fighters tackling the blazes that have ravaged Portugal are doing so with the aid of a satellite data-link. For the first time, ESA’s satellite Artemis has been used to support an emergency request under the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters.
Portugal’s civil protection unit (SNBPC) was able to
receive information and groups of images that
showed the scope of the fires. The data, transmitted
from ESA’s Earth observation satellite, Envisat, via
the Artemis data-relay spacecraft in geostationary orbit, were received in near real-time at the ESA data processing centre, located at ESRIN near Rome.
The Charter is an international collaboration to combine international satellite resources to assist participating rescue authorities and other civil protection agencies. ESA participates in the Charter together with Argentina, Canada, France, India and the USA.
In this image burnt areas appear as very dark patches to the
northeast of Lisbon, close to the centre of the land part of the image, along the Tagus River. Lisbon itself is visible south of the large whitish area at the mouth of the Tagus. The image covers all of Portugal plus part of Spain’s Galicia region.
Artemis is ESA’s latest telecommunications satellite, designed to
qualify new space technologies and promote new services. It also
carries payloads for land mobile communications and a navigation
payload as an element of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS).
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