Europe launches first part of space-based 'data highway'

Europe launched the first part of a new space "data highway" night that will pave the way for faster than ever monitoring of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods.

The EDRS-A node is the first building block of the European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS), a "big data highway" costing nearly Euro 500 million ($545 million) that will harness new laser-based communications technology. The EDRS will considerably improve transmission of large amounts of data, such as pictures and radar images, from satellites in orbit to Earth as they will no longer have to wait for a ground station on Earth to come into view.

The EDRS-A node, riding piggyback on a Eutelsat communications satellite, blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on board a Proton rocket at 2220 GMT. EDRS-A, which is to orbit Earth at an altitude of around 36,000 km, houses a laser terminal that works essentially like an autonomous telescope capable of locking on to moving targets on Earth. It will send data to and from Earth or between satellites at a rate of 1.8 Gigabits per second, which is about equivalent to sending all the data that could be printed in a one-metre long shelf of books in one second, according to generally accepted industry measures.

The EDRS will relay data on sea ice, oil spills or floods from Europe's multi-billion euro Copernicus Earth observation project to users in Europe, Africa and the Atlantic area, but its services will also be available to other paying customers.