What's new here is that they are trying to get a constellation up very cheap (20M) and expect to get a 50:1 return on investment.
The sensors themselves aren't that impressive and low resolution when compared to RADARSAT-2, TerraSAR-X and CosmoSkymed.

Let's hope they fund some new work into the GPL SAR Toolbox NEST http://www.array.ca/nest

The 7th floor kept moving here in Toronto for quite a long time

$500k stretched over 100 years isn't going to do much research. $500k over 1 year will produce a paper that says we'll need a lot more money

Dumping the US$ fast! All transactions on android market will now only be in CDN dollars

With all the new data that is and will be freely available to everyone, we could use some SoC help on the open source toolboxes BEAM, NEST and others.
Please send in your ideas on what could be worked on for NEST here
NEST could definitely benefit from more GIS functionality with more integration with GeoTools or other Java GIS libraries.

Wathcing over our planet tutorial at the Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing http://www.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/resource/tutor/planet/index_e.php

If you are interested in remote sensing or image processing, please contribute to an ESA open source project such as NEST BEAM or PolSARPro

Definitely not the best there is. Try the community edition of IntelliJ IDEA and you'll see what really helpful tools can do for you. Code with pleasure.

For visualizing terrain data the open source NEST ESA SAR Toolbox is great. It automatically downloads SRTM tiles as needed to orthorectify SAR images. When the interferometry modules are ready it will also be able to generate new DEMs from SAR images

SRTM 3sec DEM is also available via anon FTP in GeoTIFF format from http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/

Wake me up when I'm able to program these in a high level language with a decent amount of memory onboard.

This is a digital elevation map at 30m resolution. The only other global DEM freely available is SRTM from a shuttle mission a while ago. It's only available at 90m globally and 30m for the US. This will be used for orthorectifying images and interferometry of satellite data among other things.

All-weather in this case means Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and I don't believe this is anymore a spy satellite than Radarsat2.