EN TR

Article

INTA SPACETURK: A pioneer in Eurasia region on Satellite Imagery

INTA Spaceturk is a pioneering and leading company

Date: Issue 7 - January 2008

Defence Turkey: Can you provide us with general information on the general structure, development

progress, mission and strategy of Inta Space Turk, which has been progressing rapidly since 2001 when it was established completely as a Turkish company and which today undersigns successes in the international field?



It’s majority shares controlled by the Turkish onglomerate Cukurova Holding Inta Spaceturk is a ery high resolution imaging satellite operator n the Eurasia region and operates out of its tellite ground station located in Ankara. As a egional affiliate of GeoEye, a global owner and perator of various satellites, Inta Spaceturk ercises its imaging rights by collecting imagery irectly via tasking and controlling the Ikonos atellite. Inta Spaceturk also distributes 2.5m esolution SPOT5 satellite imagery of Spot Image. With an efficient and keen collection, rocessing and marketing distribution chain, Inta Spaceturk presents a ynamic company structure adaptive to market demand variations spanning from basic raw imagery to value added turn key system eliveries. The evolution of the company in terms

of market penetration has followed a balanced xpansion pattern over private and public sectors of Turkey as well as Eurasia countries during t’s 6 years of operation. Inta Spaceturk wns and holds the exclusive title, marketing and istribution rights for Ikonos imagery in Turkey. ission of Inta Spaceturk has been to be one stop multi-capable and multisource company for satellite imagery and its derivative products within the Eurasia region and beyond. However, for the last few years, the company activities have been stretching beyond this definition shifting the weight of goods and services from full private public basic imagery business towards ore and more defence oriented and alue added goods and services. s for the strategies we will experience The widening of business scope of Inta Spaceturk in the near future. The future includes continuation of satellite imagery sourcing with doubled esolution next generation imaging satellites, increased processing capacities inline with market demands, continued expansion into the defence and intelligence market, penetration into market regions beyond Eurasia with imagery and non- magery based value added products and ystems integration.



Defence Turkey: The Satellite Ground Station, which is owned by INTA Spaceturk and established

in Ankara – Golbasi, represents the largest ational private sector investment in Turkey

and the Eurasia which it is included in. Can you provide us with information on remote detection technologies and other capacities?





Inta Spaceturk in-house capabilities span over not only remote sensing but range from tasking imaging satellites, operating imaging satellite ground stations, image production, processing

and exploitation, intelligence systems integration and professional customer service and care. In our ground station each day we plan

for image collections and directly task the Ikonos satellite according to such plan to the satisfaction of our customers. The Ikonos is the first commercial 82cm direct taskable imaging

satellite operated with utmost efficiency by our Turkish team of engineers. Imagery collected through our ground station is almost completely clear of cloud cover which is a well accepted success story told among other 12 foreign commercial and government Ikonos regional operators which are spread around the world. Our satellite operations team is a dedicated and one

of a kind group within Turkey waiting ready to share its unrivalled technical and operational experience within the national Turkish satellite programs. Our geographical information systems

team has accumulated a vast amount of experience in the production of orthorectified or enhanced geolocation accuracy high quality imagery.

Millions of square kilometer imagery from various satellites have been processed in-house. These have been analyzed, classified and vectorized to meet customer requirements. Such

exploitation include but is not limited to land use and cover classification 2 and 3 dimensional feature extraction, change detection and intelligence extraction. Our software development team integrates imagery collected and processed into value added systems such as city information systems for municipalities and utilities companies, vehicle tracking and management systems for field operations, visual databases for pilot training systems, mobile and internet platforms and applications.





Defence Turkey: 3 business packages of HELSIM Project, which was signed between HAVELSAN INC. and SSM, are nder the responsibility of INTA Spaceturk, and its Visual atabase business package is anufactured by INTA paceturk. What are your capacities nd products on the field of Defense? In which directions the urrently ngoing projects and our works on this issue continue?





HELSIM Project represents a diversion point for Inta Spaceturk into the defence market with value added goods and services. Previously with

mainly direct imagery sales to the Turkish Armed Forces Inta Spaceturk has caught the opportunity to put its visual database production capability

at the disposal of the defence market through this project. Among visual database production with 3D model inserts of airfields and super features we also provide imagery analysis,

change detection through temporal images, image intelligence extraction and intelligence systems integration. JEMUS Project is a follow on activity in line with Inta Spaceturk forward

move into the defence business. JEMUS is an integrated communications and information system project that increases the capability of wide

area communications including data and voice for General Command of Gendarmerie. Inta Spaceturk is

responsible for the production of the geographical database of the system for a coverage area including 18 provinces in Turkey. The database consists of two components; IKONOS satellite imagery at 1m spatial resolution for urban areas and digitalization of street based vector data. The data has many geographical layers and attributes in order to meet military

needs. All of the layers have a relationship

hierarchically for making flexible of spatial and attribute queries and analyses. SPOT satellite imagery at 5m spatial resolution for rural areas and digitalizationof main roads, highways, district and village roads and settlement data as points. The data has the same

hierarchical structure with IKONOS data areas in order to ease of way finding, tracking vehicles and teams in all responsibility zones with an excellent data transmission. The Gökturk project involving thelaunching of a custom made national

imaging satellite is another defenceprogram which we are closely monitoring.As IntaSpaceturk we stronglyencourage the commercialization of

the Gökturk satellite within the programso that the nation can benefitfrom financial gains and the globe can benefit from its services. Such dual military and commercial usage of thesatellite will create future financing for upcoming satellites and will open the way for serial ground segment production for the Turkish Defence Industry. Inta Spaceturk with its long term investments, experienced operational personnel and production capabilities constitute an excellent, cost effective national domain for pre launch space and ground segment operations,

know-how build-up and ramp-up for imagery consumption for the Turkish Armed Forces.



Defence Turkey:What are the works and accomplishments of Inta Spaceturk, which has an

infrastructure to catch the image of 50 countries on a circular field with a diameter of four thousand six hundred kilometers centered

in Ankara, on International platforms including defense? In what sense do you consider that you have a great competitive power in the international platform? What are your targets for

the coming period in terms of increasing your efficiency in the international market?



One of our main advantages with respect to the defence market of Europe, Central Asia and the Turkic Republics is that we own our ground

station and exercise our imaging rights autonomously. Our facility has been certified by the Ministry of Defence and cleared for critical government tasks. Our mission critical personnel

owns personal clearances at various confidential levels. Operations are performed in strict confidentiality and priority mechanisms are activated for fast delivery of time critical collection tasks. Another main advantage is that Inta Spaceturk owns the imagery it collects

hence is able to model the businesses with flexibility. Along with expert personnel and job completion records such characteristics places us at a sole source position for Very High

Resolution satellite imagery which has lead us into getting work shares in defence projects like Helsim and Jemus. The European Union Satellite Center in Spain for instance has been our multiyear customer that has expressed its

satisfaction and happiness from our goods and services in repeated letters. Likely our imagery supply services to the Hellenic Military Geographical Institute in Greece have been successful and we are aiming to supply the

AGROGI S.A. under the Greek Ministry of Agriculture for the upcoming years. The Land Parcel Identification System of Poland was another significant international supply service conducted in 2003 and the Worldbank urban planning project for the Tiran Municipality completed in 2005 are other examples of international business. As it has always been

we will be enlarging our market share while keeping our market leadership in the region through increasing the number and content of turn-key projects in the coming future within the

defence sector. Beginning this year the remote sensing industry will start benefiting from the

next generation 40 cm resolutionimaging satellites to be launched by GeoEye and DigitalGlobe. DigitalGlobe operating the Quickbird satellite plans launching the WoldView-1 satellite on September 18 of 2007. GeoEye operating the Ikonos satellite is planning to

launch its GeoEye-1 satellite end of Q1 2008. These satellites will have very high raw coordinate accuracies with vast collection capacities. Both of the nonrecurring costs are half financed by the US Government for imaging the whole globe. Remaining capacities shall be open to the commercial use including the international defence market. Inta Spaceturk will continue its activities with these new generation satellites. These satellites will have a deep impact on meeting defence market

demands especially by means of enhanced identification capability due to higher resolutions and faster delivery times due to high collection rates.



Defence Turkey: At what level are your Research and Development works, and what sort of a rogram does Inta Spaceturk follow in line with such works? Can you provide us with information

on your completed or ongoing Research and Development projects? Can there be an international cooperation in this regard on the issue of R & D works?





Inta Spaceturk R&D budgets have historically

been mainly allocated to creation of quickly attainable techniques towards gaining competitive advantage for imminent and the highly probable projects. For certain long term

R&D efforts such as development of Location Based Services satellite imagery and derived data over mobile platforms Inta Spaceturk has benefited from TUBITAK and the Turkish

Technology Development Foundation’s support fundings. Another example to one of our current

defence oriented and internally funded R&D projects involve creation of Network Centric distributed data fusion and display systems over 3D Visual Geodatabases that would be enabled over internet and intranet platforms.The project aims at unleashing the power of visual interpretation of sensor systems over 3D visual replicas of the tactical environment for mission planning and decision support. Defence Turkey: As a finishing statement what would be your

closing remarks? The power of visual information and intelligence is gaining importance exponentially. Inta Spaceturk’s fast track of evolution is a good indication to this fact. The significant US Government funding to the next generation imaging satellites and the Turkish Government interest in owning its own national imaging satelliteall indicate in this direction. We sincerely believe that the future will uncover more and more application areas and uses of very high resolution satellite imagery and Inta Spaceturk will continue to play a leading role in the Eurasia region and beyond.