France/CNES

MH370 DECODED
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Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES)


The Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) is a French space agency.

To assist the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 the CNES provided imagery from the Pleiades 1A satellite to Geoscience Australia.

Pleiades Satellite Images

As prime contractor for the Pleiades system, CNES contracted with Airbus Defence & Space (former EADS Astrium Satellites) to build the satellites and with Thales Alenia Space for the optical instrument. In Europe, programme partners Austria, Belgium, Spain and Sweden were also involved in satellite construction. Pleiades was initially developed as part of the French-Italian ORFEO programme (Optical and Radar Federated Earth Observation), of which it is the optical component and COSMO-Skymed (Italy) is the radar component. [1]

Images from the Pleiades 1A satellite acquired on 23rd March 2014 whilst above the Indian Ocean were provided to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB)and subsequently analysed by Geoscience Australia.


CNES Website


Publications, Reports and other documents relevant to MH370

Two articles relevant to MH370 were available on the CNES website. Neither is currently (2024) indexed. One is still available from the Web Archive:-

Thursday, 18 June 2015
Crashs, balises et satellites (Crashes, beacons and satellites).
Tuesday, 3 November 2015
Débris du MH-370 : les satellites peuvent-ils aider? (MH-370 Debris: Can Satellites Help?) - linked from the Web Archive.


References
  1. PLEIADES (French)
    PLEIADES (via Web Archive)