Moroccan Royal Centre for Remote Sensing

The Royal Centre for Remote Sensing (CRTS — Centre Royal de Télédétection Spatiale), headquartered in Rabat, Morocco and founded in 1989, is Morocco's primary space institution responsible for operating Earth observation satellites, processing and distributing satellite imagery for national development applications, and coordinating Morocco's space activities in cooperation with international space agencies — making Morocco one of Africa's most sophisticated space-using nations.

CRTS's flagship program is the Mohammed VI Earth observation satellite series: Mohammed VI-A and Mohammed VI-B are twin high-resolution optical Earth observation satellites built by Airbus Defence & Space (France) and Thales Alenia Space (France) in a €500 million technology transfer and manufacturing program funded by Morocco, with both satellites launched in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

The satellites operate in sun-synchronous orbit at approximately 700 km altitude, providing 0.7-meter panchromatic and 2-meter multispectral resolution imagery — a very high resolution capability comparable to commercial satellites from Maxar and Airbus Intelligence. The satellite manufacturing contract included provisions for significant Moroccan industrial participation and technology transfer, with Moroccan engineers working alongside French contractors at the Airbus Toulouse facility.

Mohammed VI imagery is used for Morocco's national mapping programs, agricultural land use monitoring across Morocco's diverse agricultural regions (the Souss-Massa region's intensive horticulture, the Gharb plain's cereals, the High Atlas region's mountain agriculture), urban planning and informal settlement mapping in rapidly growing cities like Casablanca and Rabat, disaster response including earthquake and flood damage assessment, and border surveillance applications. Morocco's geopolitical position — borders with Algeria, Mauritania, and the disputed Western Sahara territory — makes satellite surveillance capability strategically significant.

CRTS participates in regional remote sensing cooperation through the Arab Centre for Remote Sensing (ACSRS) and collaborates with the European Space Agency (ESA) under Morocco's ESA Associated Country agreement, which provides access to Copernicus Sentinel data and ESA research programs. Morocco has expressed aspirations for a Mohammed VI-C satellite with even higher resolution and a domestic small satellite program to build indigenous manufacturing capability.