CONAE — Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales

Overview

CONAE — the Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales — is Argentina's civilian space agency, created in 1991 and based in Buenos Aires. Over three decades it has quietly built Latin America's most capable satellite engineering tradition, first through the SAC science satellites flown with NASA, then with the SAOCOM radar pair that anchors the programme today.

SAOCOM 1A (2018) and 1B (2020) carry L-band synthetic-aperture radar that sees through cloud, day or night, specialised in soil-moisture maps that serve Argentine agriculture directly. They fly as one system with Italy's COSMO-SkyMed satellites in the joint SIASGE constellation. The next steps are SABIA-Mar, an ocean-observation satellite built with regional partners, and Tronador II — a light launcher meant to give Argentina its own road to orbit.

Quick Facts

Key Programmes

SAOCOM radar constellation

Two L-band SAR satellites (2018, 2020) mapping soil moisture through cloud and darkness — flown jointly with Italy's COSMO-SkyMed as the SIASGE constellation.

SABIA-Mar

An ocean-colour and coastal-monitoring satellite, Argentina's next major spacecraft, developed with regional cooperation.

Tronador II

A domestically developed light orbital launcher, matured through suborbital VEx test flights, targeting small payloads to low Earth orbit.

SAC heritage with NASA

The SAC-A to SAC-D satellites (1990s–2011) partnered with NASA — SAC-D carried NASA's Aquarius ocean-salinity instrument.

Launch Infrastructure

Launch Vehicles

Timeline