Skip to content

(8th February 2016, Brussels) A European Marketplace for EO Services will enable companies to offer new products and services building upon those coming from Copernicus and other sources. It will allow the European industry to capitalise on the public investments in Copernicus and, by linking with other data sets, can unleash a new wave of innovative geospatial products addressing many markets.

European industry and stakeholders must organise to overcome a fragmented industry sector and create an alternative to US IT giants.

The position paper sets out the roles of the different actors and next steps in order to achieve this European marketplace.

Position Paper – Creating a European Marketplace for Earth Observation Services
The press release can also be downloaded next

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) are set to begin monitoring rampant illegal logging in tropical rain forests near the equator, using the advanced land observation satellite Daichi-2.

The two agencies will start the project from this autumn, and release the data on their websites for developing countries that are struggling to deal with illegal logging.

The predecessor satellite, Daichi, has achieved remarkable results in monitoring illegal logging in the Amazon. Daichi-2 will play a role in protecting tropical rain forests all over the world, widening the observation areas.

Daichi-2 is a satellite with onboard radar that can also capture images of the areas at night and without regard to weather conditions. The satellite, which was launched in 2014, has so far been used mainly for observing land deformation and floods caused by disasters.

It is difficult to monitor illegal logging in vast rain forests from the ground. But as the Daichi-2 radar can track vegetation changes on the ground, it has been adopted for monitoring illegal logging.

Data can be captured at a resolution of about 50 meters by 50 meters, and the monitoring area extends across 16.6 million square kilometers of tropical rain forests in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America and other areas. The two agencies will create maps showing newly deforested areas, and release the data on the websites free of charge every six weeks.

The agencies will also train 500 people overseas, over a period of five years, who can analyze the data, and hold an international conference with relevant countries. The project will cost ¥500 million in total over the five-year period.

The satellite Daichi has succeeded in detecting 140 cases of illegal logging annually in Brazil, in monitoring conducted from 2009 to 2011 at the request of the Brazilian government.

Source

The recent launch of the new Sentinel satellites, part of the European Union’s ‘Copernicus’ Earth observation programme, has the potential to help farmers take precision agriculture to a new level, along with a host of other land monitoring uses.

Sentinel data will create a major opportunity for service providers, and can be applied within agri-tech.

Vladimir Stoiljkovic, Business Development Manager at the Satellite Applications Catapult, who will be attending the Agri-Tech East workshop “A Sense of Place – Geomatics Meets Soil Management”on 17th May, said: ’The integration of free satellite data sets from the Sentinel satellites with other datasets offers the potential for improved precision farming products and services.”

Sentinel is part of the Copernicus Earth observation programme, which includes six families of satellites, each with a different focus, and thousands of sensors in land, sea and air to help monitor our Earth. This satellite network provides data sources that could be used for precision farming, disease prediction or drought warning.

Stoiljkovic continues: “The European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites will provide high resolution optical, radar and altimetry data about land and sea temperatures. The most interesting for agri-tech is Sentinel 1 and 2, which will provide global land cover.”

Sentinel-1 offers radar imaging, which cuts through any cloud cover and can be used to monitor crop growth/health.

Although the data sets from the Sentinel satellites are free of charge, some of them require additional analysis to be useable, which creates a business opportunity for service providers.

“The issue with satellite imaging has been the resolution,” says Stoiljkovic. “Free data is available to 10m resolution but it is now possible to purchase data with a resolution of 31cm, which can be used to evaluate crop growth.

“Emerging technology has shown it is possible to identify the growth stage of crops this could be extremely valuable when timing of applying fertilisers and irrigation. We have found that some of the larger grower groups are employing satellite data analysts to create these types of models.”

The Agri-Tech East Special Interest Group meeting “A Sense of Place – Geomatics Meets Soil Management” on 17th May will provide technology developers with an opportunity to meet farmers and growers and understand better how to bring a geo-spatial focus to information gathering. There will also be discussion of how data from different sources could be integrated and what users would require from this.

Source

[Via Satellite 04-04-2016] UrtheCast has formed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to boost the operational effectiveness of the company’s upcoming OptiSAR constellation. The agreement enables the two organizations to collaborate on Research and Development (R&D) related to the primary areas of multi-source fusion, improving/ensuring metric accuracy, and optimizing collection and dissemination strategies.

UrtheCast is preparing a commercial constellation of multispectral optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Earth Observation (EO) satellites, which is now known as OptiSAR. The company plans 16 satellites — eight optical and eight SAR — flying in two orbital planes, with each plane consisting of four satellite pairs, equally-spaced around the orbital plane. Each pair of satellites will consist of a dual-mode, high-resolution optical satellite (video and pushbroom) and a dual-band high-resolution SAR satellite (X-band and L-band), flying in tandem.

This CRADA will allow UrtheCast to work closely with an experienced user and make early changes to its systems architecture, if deemed appropriate. The specific R&D under these areas will support UrtheCast’s government and commercial customer base. The company expects to deploy the OptiSAR constellation over multiple launches and to begin operations in 2020.

Source

- The French National Institute of Geographic and Forestry Information (IGN) has awarded the Thales-Airbus Defence and Space consortium the GeoMaps contract for the next six years – French armed forces will get high added-value geographical data that will give them the upper hand in missions in theatres of operations

The IGN, acting for the Direction Générale de l’Armement (DGA), the French defence procurement agency, has thus renewed its confidence in this consortium founded more than a decade ago to create TopoBase Défense, which GeoMaps now supersedes. It is one of the main building blocks of the GEODE 4D program – the four-dimensional defence data (geographical, hydrographic, oceanographic and meteorological) – which integrates all the systems required to keep the French armed forces sufficiently informed of the nature and characteristics of the theatre concerned. In the future, the GeoMaps data will be managed by the GEODE 4D program and disseminated to all the defense systems and in all theaters of operations.

The French Military Staff will be capable of generating highly value-added data to meet the challenges that defence forces now face: to recall the latest multi-scale geographical data (from national to urban level) and to keep it highly precise and updated regularly to ensure that the information is accurate. The areas to be produced will be defined according to the respective needs of the armed forces.

The Thales-Airbus Defence and Space consortium will handle the whole process: from analysing what the Military Staff need, through running quality control checks on the products supplied. This also includes managing specifications, defining the production framework (procedures, tools, controls) and is based on a large network of SMEs to ensure that all of the data is consistent and homogeneous.

“We are very proud of the confidence that has been shown in our consortium.. It really recognises our teams’ expertise and the know-how of the French SMEs we rely on. The accuracy of the data we provide is vital if the operations which French armed forces are involved in and the fight against terrorism in particular will succeed,” said Bernhard Brenner, Head of Intelligence Business Cluster at Airbus Defence and Space.

“Thales is a trusted partner to the military and security industry. With GeoMaps, the consortium stands behind them, with support in theatres of operations, providing them with high added-value data to meet their varying operational constraints and conducting operations with intelligence systems. In an age of asymmetrical conflicts, being able to rely on highly precise geographical data gives them a real technical advantage on the ground,” said Jean-Michel Lagarde, Deputy General Manager, Secure communications and Information Systems.

About Airbus Defence and Space

Airbus Defence and Space, a division of Airbus Group, is Europe’s number one defence and space enterprise and the second largest space business worldwide. Its activities include space, military aircraft and related systems and services. It employs more than 38,000 people and in 2015 generated revenues of over 13 billion Euros.

Contact:
Fabienne GRAZZINI + 33 5 62 19 41 19
fabienne.grazzini@astrium.eads.net

Contribute to the EU Geospatial Business Outlook Report.

Geospatial Media and Communications is conducting a survey on European Geospatial Business Profile to understand the business profile of geospatial industry in Europe. The result of this survey shall be presented in European Geospatial Business Outlook Report that will be published in May 2016, and to be launched at the inaugural European Geospatial Business Summit, part of the programmes at Geospatial World Forum 2016 in the week of 23-26 May in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Link to the survey

A couple of weeks ago, the Cartosat-2C — built at Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad — has been dispatched to ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) at Bengaluru after successful rounds of tests and evaluation.

ISRO’s earth observation satellite Cartosat-2C will be launched in May using a PSLV rocket. It will prove to be a shot-in-the arm for India’s military surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. The launch will help place India in a select league of nations like US, Israel and China who have similar or better spy satellites that keep a close watch of happenings on Earth from space.

A couple of weeks ago, the Cartosat-2C — built at Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad — has been dispatched to ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) at Bengaluru after successful rounds of tests and evaluation. This brand new satellite follows the steps of Cartosat-2A which was India’s first dedicated military satellite, launched in 2007, that had the capability to monitor missile launches in its neighbourhood.

“Though little is known about this new satellite which has been built by scientists at SAC, it will be a follow-up mission in the Cartosat series and is expected to provide very high resolution pictures and videos captured from space,” an ISRO official said.

The 690-kilogram dual-use satellite is equipped with a Panchromatic Camera and a high-resolution multi-spectral instrument. This camera will have a resolution of 0.65 metres which is an improvement over the 0.8 metre camera sent on earlier missions. The new camera onboard the mission, can not only click high resolution pictures of disputed border and coastal areas, but can also record videos of sensitive targets from space, compress it, and relay it back to Earth.

ISRO officials describe this satellite “as one of the best eyes in space” that India has launched till date. The strength of the camera installed in this home-grown satellite is almost at par with the ones possessed by US and China. For instance, in 2014, the Chinese had set a remote sensing satellite “Yaogan 24” which had a similar camera of 0.65 metre resolution. The panchromatic imagers can not only be used for surveillance, but can also aid in disaster monitoring. It will also click images that can give an idea of temperatures of a particular location in comparison with the surrounding areas. Cartosat-2C is expected to be launched along with 21 other satellites in May using a PSLV rocket. It will be placed in a sun-synchronous polar orbit at a low-earth altitude of about 200-1,200 kms above the Earth’s surface.

See more at

The industry has experienced an increase of free software programs for integrating data across different types of platforms and merging it with archival records from multiple private and government sources.

This change is shifting the industry’s economic center away from its pioneers rooted in the defense and intelligence segments of the aerospace industry and toward small entrepreneurially driven enterprises. While the cost of creating remote sensing products will fall from tens of dollars to as little as pennies expanded global demand will increase the value of the global business at a double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

BCC Research examines the remote sensing products in its report, Remote Sensing Technologies and Global Markets (IAS022E). Global market revenues should reach nearly $8.9 billion and $13.8 billion in 2016 and 2021, respectively, reflecting a five-year CAGR of 9.3%.

  • Gain information about the industry, with descriptions of important applications including weather forecasting, intelligence gathering, climate change, and public health
  • Understand how recent technological changes will alter the market
  • Learn about the major patents and remote sensing research programs
  • Review forecasts of remote sensing application areas and supporting data

Download Report Overview
Buy Chapter or Report (10% off on our Market Research Reports – Ends June 30th.)
Request More Information

FRANKFURT • Europe has launched the first part of a new space “data highway” that will pave the way for faster monitoring of natural disasters like earthquakes and floods.

The first building block of the European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS), the EDRS-A node is a “big data highway” that costs nearly €500 million (S$785 million) and will harness new laser-based communications technology.

The EDRS will improve transmission of large amounts of data such as pictures and radar images from satellites in orbit to Earth because they will no longer have to wait for a ground station on Earth to come into view.

The EDRS-A node, riding piggyback on a Eutelsat communications satellite, was blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, on board a Proton rocket on Friday.

The node, which is to orbit Earth at an altitude of about 36,000km, houses a laser terminal that works much like an autonomous telescope capable of locking on to moving targets on Earth.

It will send data to and from Earth or between satellites at a rate of 1.8 gigabits a second, which is about the same as sending all the data that could be printed in a 1m-long shelf of books in one second, according to standard industry measures.

The EDRS will relay data on sea ice, oil spills or floods from Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation project to users in Europe, Africa and the Atlantic area, but its services will also be available to other paying customers.

The EDRS is a public-private partnership between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Airbus Defence and Space.

Pairing EDRS-A with the Eutelsat 9B satellite, which will beam TV images to Europe, cuts down on costs for both satellite operator Eutelsat and the ESA as they share the expenses of the launch and joint systems. A second satellite, EDRS-C, is to be launched in the middle of next year.

Eventually, others could follow, and they could also be coupled with commercial craft.

“We are open to pairing a third EDRS payload with a future Eutelsat satellite,” said Eutelsat chief technical officer Yohann Leroy.

Source

5th February 2016 By: Ilan Solomons. Monitoring abandoned mines and illegal mining activities using satellite imagery is now possible, says Hansjörg Eberle, director of Crosstech remediation services provider and subsidiary of the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action.

Crosstech, as part of the Swiss consortium that also includes software company Sarmap, with cofinancing from the European Space Agency (ESA), is aiming to demonstrate how this can be done through an applied research project. Eberle says such a system will be well suited to South Africa, which has serious difficulties with monitoring abandoned mines and illegal mining activities.

He adds that, as the mining sector is in the doldrums, abandoned and mothballed mining sites are likely to increase. “We are looking for partner organisations (government or commercial) that are willing to participate in a demonstration project, at no cost to them,” he tells Mining Weekly.

He notes that the research project forms part of the ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) 20 Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme. The ARTES 20 IAP programme is dedicated to the development, implementation and pilot operations of integrated applications. These are applications that combine data from at least two existing and different space assets such as satellite communication, earth observation, satellite navigation and human spaceflight technologies.

“The ultimate aim of the programme is to bring a product or services to market,” Eberle states. He says several technologies have abundantly been described by researchers, but have not been incorporated into mainstream products or services. Eberle cites synthetic aperture radar, which can detect changes up to the millimetre by comparing images taken at different times, as an example. This technology can help to detect whether a dam has shifted over the years, whether there is erosion at tailings dams or whether the soil is moving through subsidence.

“Such tiny movements are often the precursors for bigger shifts, leading to major disasters, as we have recently seen with the dam break in Brazil.” Using the same technology also allows for tracing the history of an area for as long as satellite imagery is available (up to 20 years) and drawing conclusions based on the history of what has happened in the past, he adds.

Further, Eberle notes that a key driver of innovation is using satellite imagery, which is becoming increasingly available free of charge, such as the ESA’s series of Sentinel satellites. He points out that satellite imagery is becoming available more rapidly than in the past and, in some instances, updated satellite imagery can be generated on a monthly or weekly basis.

“This allows for monitoring and change detection in almost real time.” Eberle comments that such techniques will allow for the remote environmental monitoring of mining sites. Most mining companies and regulators continue to monitor sites by driving to and patrolling them or – in some cases – by planting sensors in some locations. While these methods might work for one site, it becomes inefficient and costly when dozens or hundreds of sites have to be monitored.

“We believe we can develop a monitoring system based on actual user requirements using these techniques. The end product could be regularly updated, with detailed risk maps for geologists and high-level risk maps with interpretation and plain language text for decision-makers . . . [which] will be available on the Internet,” he concludes.

Source