The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters is a charter which provides for the charitable retasked acquisition of and transmission of space satellite data to relief organizations in the event of major disasters.

Initiated by the European Space Agency and the French space agency CNES after the UNISPACE III conference held in Vienna, Austria in July 1999, it officially came into operation on November 1, 2000 after the Canadian Space Agency signed onto the charter on October 20, 2000. Their troika of space assets was, respectively, ERS and ENVISAT, SPOT and Fomosat, and RADARSAT. 

The assorted satellite assets of various private, national, and international space agencies provide for humanitarian coverage which is wide albeit contingent. First activated for floods in northeast France in December 2001,[1] the Charter has since brought space assets into play for numerous earthquakes, oil spills, forest fires, tsunamis, major snowfalls, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and landslides.

The International Charter aims at providing a unified system of space data acquisition and delivery to those affected by natural or man-made disasters through Authorized Users. Each member agency has committed resources to support the provisions of the Charter and thus is helping to mitigate the effects of disasters on human life and property.

DMC International Imaging (DMCii) is a company specialised in Earth imaging services. It provides: satellite imagery, archived data, related project services, and manages the DMC satellite constellation.

The company manages the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC), a constellation of Earth observation satellites. It is a satellite constellation that delivers high frequency imaging anywhere on the globe from an established and growing collection of satellites. The constellation is coordinated by DMCii to deliver high quality commercial earth imaging services.

DMCii manages the DMC constellation for the 'International Charter for Space and Major Disasters'. 

DMCII is a wholly owned subsidiary of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). 

Kongsberg Satellite Services AS or KSAT is an operator of satellite ground stations based in Tromsø, Norway. KSAT has three main ground stations: Tromsø Satellite Station, Svalbard Satellite Station and Troll Satellite Station.

KSAT is a commercial Norwegian enterprise, uniquely positioned to provide ground station and earth observation services for polar orbiting satellites. With three interconnected polar ground stations; Tromsø at 69°N, Svalbard (SvalSat) at 78°N and Antarctic TrollSat Station at 72°S, and a growing mid-latitude network, KSAT operates over 60 antennas optimally positioned for access to polar orbits.

KSAT is a joint venture equally owned by the Kongsberg Group and the Norwegian Space Centre, the latter owned by the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Dutch Space is a supplier of subsystems for the European space industry. The company, originally a member of the Fokker group, was established as an independent company in 1995, and has about 300 employees (in 2013).

Dutch Space is a European independent solar array manufacturer for spacecraft. The solar array program ranges from telecommunication and science to earth observation applications. The Dutch Space solar arrays combine heritage (based on the Advanced Rigid Array - ara- concept) and flexibility.

CRISA (Computadoras, Redes e Ingeniería, S.A.) is a Spanish company founded in 1985 to design and manufacture electronic equipment and software for space applications: satellites, launchers, orbital infrastructure and space transportation vehicles. In 2000, CRISA became part of the EADS Astrium group.

CRISA, employs (in 2013) more than 390 people. The company has played a relevant role in several ESA's scientific and Earth observation missions, developing payload processors and hardware and software controllers: data processing units, control units, power conditioning and distribution units, ground segment and test bench equipment.

All of these developments play a vital role in monitoring the Earth's environmental conditions, the observation of natural events, as well as the scientific research of the Universe, the Moon, comets and planets. Some of the main programs that carry this equipment onboard include the Meteosat Second Generation, MetOp, Rosetta, Mars and Venus Express, Herschel, Planck, GOCE, ATV vehicles, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity or Ariane 5 and Vega launchers. Presently, more than 25 projects are being undertaken for future upcoming missions like Ingenio, Paz, LISA Pathfinder, Gaia, Sentinel-2&3, BepiColombo, EathCARE, Solar Orbiter or Metosat Third Generation among others.

CRISA is also very active in telecommunication satellites developing various electronic units for communications satellite platform like Eurostar E3000, AlphaBus and SmallGEO.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) is a series of experiments designed directly to detect particle dark matter in the form of WIMPs.

Using an array of semiconductor detectors at millikelvin temperatures, CDMS has set the most sensitive limits to date on the interactions of WIMP dark matter with terrestrial materials. The first experiment, CDMSI, was run in a tunnel under the Stanford University campus. The current experiment, CDMSII, is located deep underground in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota.

SuperCDMS is the successor to CDMS II. The "super" refers to the larger, improved detectors. There are actually three generations of Super CDMS planned:

• SuperCDMS Soudan, with 9.3 kg of active detector mass made of 15×620 g germanium discs (76.2 mm/3″ diameter × 25.4 mm/1″ thick). This has been operating since March 2012.
• SuperCDMS SNOLAB, with 100–200 kg of active detector mass, made of 1380 g germanium discs (100 mm/3.9″ diameter × 33.3 mm/1.3″ thick). Development is underway, and it is hoped construction will begin in 2014. The deeper SNOLAB site will reduce cosmic ray backgrounds compared to Soudan.
• GEODM (Germanium Observatory for Dark Matter), with more than 1000 kg of detector mass. Preliminary planning hopes to install this in the DUSEL laboratory.

The Global Geospace Science (GGS) WIND satellite is a NASA science spacecraft.

It was launched at 04:31:00 EST on November 1, 1994 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) in Merritt Island, Florida aboard a McDonnell Douglas Delta II 7925-10 rocket.

It was deployed to study radio and plasma that occur in the solar wind and in the Earth's magnetosphere before the solar wind reaches the Earth. The spacecraft's original mission was to orbit the Sun at the L1 Lagrangian point, but this was delayed when the SOHO and ACE spacecraft were sent to the same location. WIND has been at L1 continuously since 2004, and is still operating as of December 2012. WIND currently has enough fuel to last roughly 60 years at L1. WIND continues to produce relevant research.

WIND was designed and manufactured by Martin Marietta Astro Space Division in East Windsor, New Jersey. The satellite is a spin stabilized cylindrical satellite with a diameter of 2.4 m and a height of 1.8 m.

The primary science objectives of the Wind mission are:

• Provide complete plasma, energetic particle and magnetic field for magnetospheric and ionospheric studies.
• Investigate basic plasma processes occurring in the near-Earth solar wind.
• Provide baseline, 1 AU, ecliptic plane observations for inner and outer heliospheric missions.

Vega is an expendable launch system in use by Arianespace jointly developed by the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Development began in 1998 and the first launch took place from the Guiana Space Centre on 13 February 2012.

It is designed to launch small payloads — 300 to 2,500 kg satellites for scientific and Earth observation missions to polar and low Earth orbits. The reference Vega mission is a polar orbit bringing a spacecraft of 1,500 kilograms to an altitude of 700 kilometers.

Vega is a single-body launcher with three solid rocket stages, the P80 first stage, the Zefiro 23 second stage, the Zefiro 9 third stage, and a liquid rocket upper module called AVUM.

The VERTA (Vega Research and Technology Accompaniment) programme aims to demonstrate the flexibility of the Vega launch system. It comprises three main elements:

• Procurement of five VERTA demonstration flights;
• Customer service improvements;
• Production accompaniment and technological activities.

The first VERTA flight is scheduled to take off in the first half of 2013 following the launcher's qualification flight.

At a planned minimum rate of two launches per year, the programme will allow the smooth introduction of Vega for commercial exploitation.

The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) is a planned science mission for NASA's Explorer program, designed to study the connection between the Earth's weather and space weather.

ICON will explore the boundary between Earth and space – the ionosphere – to understand the physical connection between our world and the immediate space environment around us. This region, where ionized plasma and neutral gas collide and react exhibits dramatic variability that affects space-based technological systems like GPS. The ionosphere has long been known to respond to "space weather" drivers from the sun, but recent NASA missions have surprised us in showing this variability often occurs in concert with weather on our planet. ICON will compare the impacts of these two drivers as they exert change on the space environment that surrounds the Earth.

Led by the University of Berkeley, California, ICON will provide NASA's Heliophysics division with a new capability to observe the connection between the Earth's thermosphere and ionosphere. ICON was one of 11 proposals selected for NASA funding in September 2011, down from the original 22 submitted in February of that year. On April 12, 2013, NASA announced that ICON, along with Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD), had been selected for launch in 2017.