on national security grounds. The subsystems arrived at the David Florida Laboratory (DFL) from 2003 to 2005 for assembly, integration and testing. Work at DFL and CSA preparations at Saint-Hubert, Quebec, were completed in September 2007. RADARSAT-2 arrived at Baikonur Cosmodrome by air on 15 November 2007 and launched on 14 December 2007. Mission The end of the spacecraft and ground segment commissioning period was declared on April 27, 2008, after which routine commercial operation started. It has the same orbit (798 km altitude sun-synchronous orbit with 6 p.m. ascending node and 6 a.m. descending node). Some of the orbit characteristics are 24 days repeat cycle (=343 orbits), 14.29 orbits per day, each orbit being 100.75 minutes duration. It is filling a wide variety of application, including sea ice mapping and ship routing, iceberg detection, agricultural crop monitoring, marine surveillance for ship and pollution detection, terrestrial defence surveillance and target identification, geological mapping, mine monitoring, land use mapping, wetlands mapping, topographic mapping. On 4 July 2009, Canada's Department of National Defence announced their intention to increase RADARSAT-2 usage for surveillance of Canada's coastlines and the Arctic. To carry out this new project, the satellite's owner MDA was awarded $25-million contract to carry out upgrades (called project Polar Epsilon) to enhance the satellites capabilities to detect surface ships. The upgrades consisted of creating new beam mode (OSVN and DVWF) that target improvements in maritime vessels detection over a broad area, as well as upgrading the RADARSAT-2 ground segment to improve conflict resolution with other government users. Two new ground stations for the data reception have been built, one on the east coast at Masstown, N.S., and the other at Aldergrove, B.C. (west coast). These two new stations are mainly used for the Polar Epsilon project. By mid-August 2015, the addition of the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO, formerly CCRS) X Band receiving station in Inuvik has significantly increased RADARSAT-2 downlink capacity in Canada. The network of ground receiving station continues to expand with 19 partners organization using 53 antennas at various reception sites (as of Jun 2020). As of January 2020, RADARSAT-2 is entering its 12th operational service year. Numerous enhancements have been added to the original capabilities both on the ground and on the space segments. The operational performance is well within the specification with an acquisition success rate above 97% (Acquisition successfully executed Vs Acquisition loaded