Indra’s Earth observation satellite center in Oman

Indra is working with the Ministry of Finance and the National Survey Authority-NSA of the Ministry of Defense of the Sultanate of Oman in the implementation of an advanced Earth observation center that will provide the country with a critical capacity to enhance the competitiveness of its economy and improve the services that the Administration provides to the citizen. 

The project is part of the ‘Sultanate of Oman Vision 2040’ plan, promoted by the government to modernize its infrastructure, diversify the economy and generate quality employment.

The new center will have Indra software capable of generating high-value-added products and services from satellite images, especially those collected by the Sentinel constellation of the European Copernicus program, one of the most advanced in existence.

The company will provide advice in defining the center’s business strategy and will help define the lines of development that it will follow in the coming years. Some of the areas towards which it will direct its activity are the safety of maritime traffic, the protection of critical infrastructures, the control of land use, the analysis of the growth of urban areas, or the protection of the environment. 

The ultimate goal is to turn the Sultanate of Oman into one of the major competitors in the international Earth observation market, a sector that continues to grow as the number of satellites and the quality of the data they collect increases while they decrease. its costs. At the same time, the enormous utility that these data provide when defining public policies and business strategies means that the demand for these products is growing exponentially throughout the world.

For Domingo Castro, Indra’s Director of Defense and Space Systems, “Earth observation satellites are the most powerful tool that exists for accessing precise and fully updated information on a city, region or the entire planet at high speed. . With the establishment of this center, the Sultanate of Oman begins its journey in a sector of the future, based on the intensive use of knowledge and high technology and which is essential to move towards a more sustainable world”. 

Indra will train the specialists who will assume the management of the new facilities and will put them in contact with space agencies, research centers and universities throughout Europe with which to collaborate.

The project also opens a new path of professional development for young Omanis, who will work with technologies linked to cloud computing and artificial intelligence. To accelerate the initiative and contribute to the development of an innovative ecosystem that attracts and connects the talent of professionals, companies and administrations, the company will organize different dissemination activities and ‘hackathons’.

Indra is a global leader in technological engineering that has been working in the space sector for more than thirty years. It has played a key role in the development of the main European space infrastructures, among which the Copernicus system for observing the Earth or the Galileo system for global geo positioning stand out. It has also deployed the ground segment of the Spanish Earth observation satellite Paz and has developed one of the most powerful space radars in the world, capable of detecting objects 2,000 kilometers from Earth. More recently, It has launched a company linked to the new space, Startical, which is working on the development of a constellation of more than 200 small satellites that will provide air traffic management services throughout the planet.