CONAE

The National Commission for Space Activities (CONAE, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales) is Argentina's government space agency, established in 1991 and headquartered in Buenos Aires — one of Latin America's most technically capable space agencies, known internationally for its SAR Earth observation satellite constellation, bilateral cooperation agreements with NASA and ESA, and its role as an anchor for Argentina's aerospace industrial base.

CONAE's flagship achievement is the SAOCOM (Satélite Argentino de Observación Con Microondas) constellation — two L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites that together provide continuous SAR imaging of South America and other regions. SAOCOM 1A launched in 2018 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg in the first West Coast Falcon 9 launch, and SAOCOM 1B followed in 2020. L-band SAR (23 cm wavelength) penetrates vegetation canopy and can image through cloud cover — making SAOCOM ideal for agricultural monitoring (soil moisture mapping, crop identification, flood extent mapping beneath forest canopy), emergency management, and subsidence monitoring of infrastructure and cities.

SAOCOM is part of a bilateral Argentina-Italy cooperation program: Italy's ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) provides COSMO-SkyMed X-band SAR data to CONAE in exchange for SAOCOM L-band data, creating a complementary multi-frequency SAR monitoring capability called SIASGE (Sistema Italo-Argentino de Satélites para la Gestión de Emergencias) that has been used extensively for disaster response in South America.

Earlier CONAE programs include the SAC (Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas) series: SAC-A (1998), SAC-B (1996, technology demonstration), and SAC-C (2000, Earth observation with NASA data-sharing partnership). CONAE's Córdoba ground station receives satellite data and the agency operates the INVAP space technology company (which builds CONAE's satellites) through the provincial government of Río Negro.

CONAE represents Argentina as a respected peer in international space cooperation, having contributed instruments to ESA's Earth observation missions and maintaining bilateral agreements with NASA, ESA, DLR, and China's CNSA. Argentina's status as one of only a handful of developing nations with indigenous SAR satellite design and manufacturing capability distinguishes CONAE globally.