ELISA (satellite)

ELISA 1 (aka ELISA W11, COSPAR 2011-076A), ELISA 2 (aka ELISA E12, COSPAR 2011-076D), ELISA 3 (aka ELISA W23, COSPAR 2011-076C) and ELISA 4 (aka ELISA E24, COSPAR 2011-076B) are a suite of French military satellites (ELISA stands for Electronic Intelligence by Satellite) launched on 17 December 2011 from Arianespace's Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.

The ELISA suite are microsatellites and thus all four were launched on a single Soyuz ST-A rocket, along with Pleiades-1 and SSOT. The ELISA programme is a demonstration system to pave the way for a planned radar monitoring system called CERES. The ELISA satellites are in a Low Earth orbit a few kilometres from each other to record radar and radio transmissions. Since 2014, they are used as a pre-operational system.[1]

The satellites are built around the Myriade micro-satellite bus.

See also
  • ESSAIM - another French military SIGINT microsatellite project
  • CERES, the follow-on French space-based SIGINT program

References
  1. (in French) Hearing of the French Space Command Chief by the National Assembly


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