Astrium Agrees, ascos and ISRO On Board

The board of directors of E.ON Ruhrgas AG has decided to transfer the operation and marketing of its ascos satellite reference service to a new provider. The new ascos provider is to be a joint initiative between Astrium Services (Munich) and ALLSAT (Hannover). The partnership will continue to provide and expand the full range of ascos services for customers.




ascos was founded by E.ON Ruhrgas in 1999 to handle the surveying, maintenance and operation of its own gas pipelines. The service uses positioning signals obtained from the existing satellite navigation systems GPS (USA) and GLONASS (Russia) and corrects the data to within centimeter accuracy using a network of reference stations. This makes it possible to locate buried gas pipelines without damaging them during excavation work, for example, or to give accurate directions to helicopters inspecting gas pipes for leakage from the air.




Additionally, Astrium has also a new working agreement with India’s space agency. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will build two satellites. One satellite will be for Eutelsat (France) and is scheduled for launch by Astrium during the last quarter of 2008. The second satellite is to be built for Avanti (United Kingdom) and looks like a 2009 launch project. The agreement between Astrium and ISRO was handled through the latter’s marketing arm, Antrix Corporation—Paris, France