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Urban Growth Monitoring

The European Commission Joint Research Centre and its Global Human Settlement team have been conducting extensive research related to the ubranisation and socio-economic and physical processes associated with it.

The newly published report based on analysis of the satellite data “Global spatial and temporal analysis of human settlements from Optical Earth Observation: Concepts, procedures, and preliminary results”, is one of the result of this work.

Human settlements are the part of the landscape covered with man-made structures that include buildings, roads and transport networks.

The report addresses the physical part of human settlements, the information that is used to help answering numer of questions related with urbanisation and its challenges. For example, how much of the today’s urban and rural land areas will be used to host the settlements of tomorrow? What is the rate of growth associated to urbanization and its trends? How does urbanisation increase the risk due to environmental hazards?

Knowledge about this issues help the crisis management in case disasters.

Read more…

(Source European Commission Joint Research Centre) and Copernicus

Firstly, Mr. Steenmans, mainly for our readers outside of Europe, can you give us a picture of the European Environment Agency (EEA), what you do and what is your mission?

The EEA is an agency of the European Union. Our task is to provide sound, independent data and information on the environment to decision-makers and the general public, in order to support sustainable development and to help achieve significant and measurable improvement in Europe’s environment.

We are therefore a major information source for those involved in developing, adopting, implementing and evaluating environmental policy. Our main clients are the European Union institutions — the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council — and our member and cooperating countries. The business community, academia, non-governmental organisations and other parts of civil society are also important users of our information.

Today climate change and environmental issues are major factors determining the framework for international and national policy actions. How do you feel then overall about the use of Earth Observation to help these policy making? How important was the contribution of the Earth Observation to the latest SOER report on the assessment of the European environment’s state, trends and prospects, in a global context?

Earth Observation plays a significant part in assessing Europe’s environment. In 2015, the European Environment Agency released a report entitled “European Environment – State and Outlook 2015”, which analyses the state, trends and prospects of the European environment. Providing timely comparable information over large areas without the use of remote sensing is nowadays unthinkable. As such, the Copernicus Atmosphere and Land Monitoring services are among the key sources that contributed to the information presented in the report. In particular, the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service Imperviousness contributed to data that was used to highlight differences in urban sprawl between and within European countries, while the Urban Atlas provided detailed data for certain land cover and land use types, which was used to compare total green space in cities across Europe.

Copernicus

The EEA is the entity coordinating the pan-European and local components of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. How does and will Copernicus contribute to the EEA mandate?

The information emerging from Copernicus is integrated into environmental indicators and integrated assessments that feed into policy-making processes. For example, the EEA has significant experience with Corine Land Cover and Urban Atlas. The Copernicus programme offers a unique opportunity to ensure the long term and structural provision of more timely georeferenced information, thus complementing the aggregated data that is collected and made available by the countries through regular reporting. In that sense, Copernicus could become a game changer for land monitoring.

EARSC organized a workshop aimed at fostering the dialogue between all the European Entrusted Entities (EEE’s) and the private sector. The objective was to find a way forward for industry and the EEE’s to maximize the exploitation of Copernicus Services. We are now in the process to elaborate a roadmap together with the EEE’s, which will help on the Exploitation of Copernicus, where do you see the main priorities?

There are several aspects where improved dialogue between the EEE’s and the private sector would foster a broader use of the Copernicus services. First of all, I refer to the role of the EEE’s and industry in the production of the services: for the land monitoring service, the key focus is on the detection and mapping of changes of the biophysical Earth’s surface over time, in order to establish long term time series that facilitate reliable trend analysis.

In order to reach this objective, well-defined service requirements are needed, together with a fully understood and accessible work flow. This will ensure the high quality of the services, as well as their coherence and consistency, in line with the requirement of establishing time series. It will also allow for different companies to produce the services, following a fair and competitive market mechanism. Such competition may favour a shift towards the search for the best organisational setup, or the levels of automation necessary to make the difference in a competitive market.

I’d also like to highlight the opportunities offered by the Copernicus core services as a sound foundation for the development of downstream services. The European Commission, in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), has committed to the long term deployment of the Copernicus programme, based on an open data policy. For the first time in the history of European satellite remote sensing, this offers a unique opportunity for industrial investments in customer-tailored downstream services. In order to support this logic over the coming years, it is important that industry provides feedback to the EEE’s on the requirements for the core services, and that the EEE’s in turn take these considerations on board when working on the evolution of the Copernicus service.

As a key user of the data, the EEA is one such interface between the image data and the knowledge created from it and used by European policy makers, businesses and other stakeholders. How you can help on leveraging the exploitation of the Copernicus services inside the EC?

The use of Copernicus services in the European Commission is primarily linked to a broad range of Community policies such as environment, agriculture, regional development, transport, climate action, energy and so forth. Typically the Commission’s thematic directorates-general expect the Copernicus services to support the policy cycle, be it policy preparation, policy implementation or policy evaluation. Increasing the use of the Copernicus services in the Commission is, therefore, linked to the extent to which the services themselves manage to provide information that supports policies.

The definition of land services is one example where this is already taken on board to support environment policy: the setup of the Riparian Zones service is clearly linked with the activities of the MAES (Monitoring and Assessment of Ecosystem Services) group, managed by DG Environment. Similarly, the Urban Atlas is a service that provides valuable input for DG REGIO in supporting regional and urban policies and, in particular, the multi-annual Cohesion Report for which DG REGIO is responsible.

What can we do to encourage or enable further industrial participation in the provision of services? How do you perceive the role of EARSC in this respect?

The key role we see for EARSC as an umbrella organisation for the Earth observation industry is to create a structural information exchange channel between the EEE’s and industry, which functions in an open and transparent way. This should help to ensure fair competition, broaden the scope of potential downstream applications, further the exchange of ideas on future developments etc. In addition, EARSC can be instrumental for specific initiatives that help improve cooperation between the EEE’s and industry, such as recent work on the definition of commonly agreed accuracy assessment methods for certain categories of land monitoring products and services.

Industry & Procurement

EARSC is collaborating with EEA on an expert workshop on validation and certification of land products. How important do you see this activity creating a common understanding and forming a set of guidelines? How will the EEA expect to proceed with appropriate quality control procedures and its integration in the production process of the services?

A commonly agreed procedure for accuracy assessment on a per product or service basis was identified as an important topic during the implementation of the initial phase of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. The lack of such commonly agreed assessments sparked discussions on how exactly to measure the accuracy services, in particular newly developed ones, such as the High Resolution Layers in the pan-European component. We therefore believe the best way forward is to agree the best and most reliable approach upfront, which will obviously differ according to the nature of the product or service. The EEA intends to include references to a procedure for accuracy assessment as part of the initial internal QA/QC during production. Independent from this internal assessment, we will nevertheless continue to perform statistical validation on the final outcome of any product or service.

It is important to underline that such a product or service based accuracy assessment is clearly different from a company oriented certification process. Guidelines on how the accuracy of any product or service is measured, directly determine the quality of the Copernicus services. As such they are considered more important for consistency and coherence than any company level certification model, which might tell us about the capacities of a company, but not about the intrinsic quality of the deliverables themselves.

We enter the era of big data where we perceive there will be many opportunities to exploit data from many varied sources in combination. How does the EEA see the big data challenge in view of its role as EEE for the land monitoring service?

It seems beyond any doubt that the big data era will bring a major paradigm shift in the use of remote sensing for the environment, including land monitoring. On an almost daily basis, we will be able to exploit long term time series of satellite observations of the Earth’s surface for change monitoring on a per pixel basis. These new techniques have already demonstrated not only a tangible improvement in the level of accuracy of land cover/land use change monitoring, but also make a wealth of data available for integration with other data and information services.

However, there is still some work to be done in Europe before we can expect the systematic exploitation of these large volume satellite data sets to be fully operational. Ensuring the accessibility of time series of satellite image data together with relevant in situ data is a serious challenge, one that requires an improved data storage and dissemination architecture.

Furthermore, the sheer volume of image data calls for a move of data processing from production entities to big data centres, with a focus on processing services instead of download services. But with data centres spread worldwide, the challenge will be to tackle issues such as harmonised user interfaces, data protection and even cyber security. The Web Processing Service is a first attempt at harmonisation, but clearly top level initiatives are required. This would avoid multiple initiatives that leave the end user with an array of interfaces to deal with, thus jeopardising the optimal exploitation of big data. The situation can be compared to the differences in Earth observation file formats back in the early eighties, when the software industry was forced to try to keep pace with non-harmonised developments.

What is the EEA doing to make its data available to private enterprise (as well as individuals) so that it can be exploited in this way?

The EEA applies a full, open and free data policy to all our data and information products. We have, of course, provided support to the European Commission during political discussions on the Copernicus data and information policy and are extremely pleased to be able to offer an open and free data policy. In practice, for the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, this means that the full land monitoring portfolio is available to all commercial and public users via the land.copernicus.eu portal in three different ways: online map viewing, Open Geospatial Consortium compliant web-services and download of all datasets.

What issues do you see in making environmental data available for open use? How can we ensure that this benefits the European industry?

Our approach is one of full transparency concerning the collection, processing and assessment of the information and knowledge in our data and information products, including full traceability of underpinning data in our reports. A full, free and open data policy, together with a full traceability of data sources has contributed significantly to the credibility of the EEA.

Future

At the end of the interview, here is the opportunity for your final thoughts and how your activities could contribute to the future development of the EO geo-information service sector?

A major challenge for the coming years relates to the awareness raising of the availability of all these free and open services towards industry and other stakeholders in Europe and beyond. A good communication strategy will be required.


Chris Steenmans is Head of Programme at the European Environment Agency (EEA). He is responsible for the programming and strategic development of the EEA ICT and data management, in close cooperation with the European Environmental Information and Observation Network (EIONET).
He coordinates the EEA contributions to the European Earth observation programme (COPERNICUS), the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), the European Spatial Data Infrastructure (INSPIRE) and the European Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) and the UN Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM).
He graduated at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in 1981 as Msc Geoscience and was researcher at the Department of Cartography KUL until 1985. Before joining the EEA in 1997, he worked during 12 years in a number of private companies for providing remote sensing, data management, GIS and mapping services.
He has been actively involved in several international initiatives, including the European programme for Coordination of Information on the Environment (CORINE) for producing and providing access to European environmental datasets, the EU Programme of Community aid to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (PHARE) for the pre-accession strategy for the Central and Eastern European countries, the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) for improving environmental monitoring, data and information sharing with South and East neighbours and the Russian Federation.

Earth observation satellites are capturing every day images of our globe and its regions. The Guardian gathered beautiful examples of satellite imagery coming, among others, from Sentinel missions.

From monitoring vegetation of Khartoum in Sudan, to eruption of Sicily’s massive Etna volcano, images prove how dynamic, fascinating and diverse our world is, giving also opportunity to teach us about natural and man-made processes that are undergoing on its surface and around.

“Read more”: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/06/satellite-eye-on-earth-december-2015-in-pictures

(Source The Guardian)

By Jonathan Amos BBC. Users are now able to download its images of the planet, although they will need to register first.

The Sentinel, which has been undergoing in-orbit testing since its launch back in June, views the land surface in optical and infrared light.

Its pictures will be used by scientists to track everything from the growth of megacities to the variable yields of the world’s most important food crops.

And researchers will, of course, use 2a’s acquisitions prominently in climate studies (examples are being shown at the COP21 talks in Paris).

But the EU’s free and open data policy means anyone can now download and play with the images.

And unlike the products from some specialist satellites, which are hard to interpret – the colour views from Sentinel-2a should appeal to a very broad audience.

The European Space Agency (ESA), which manages the satellite for the EU, expects demand to be huge.

Already, many thousands of users have registered to make Sentinel downloads – and these were people who were predominantly after the more complex radar pictures being produced by another spacecraft in the series, Sentinel-1a.

“We expect the demand for all Sentinel data to be unprecedented. It is already unprecedented for us; we’ve never had so many downloads,” said Prof Volker Liebig, the director of Earth observation at Esa.

“It’s hard to put a number on what it will be for Sentinel-2a, but it will be in petabytes, for sure.”

One petabyte is roughly equivalent to 200,000 commonly used DVDs.

Optical imagery (essentially, what we see with our eyes) is the cornerstone of Earth observation, and increasingly it features in everyday applications on the web and on people’s smartphones.

One of the major sources to date of free pictures has been the American Landsat series of spacecraft, which have assembled a continuous record of the world’s fluctuating features stretching back more than 40 years.

Sentinel-2a will be complementary, but also more capable – which further suggests demand will be big.

2a’s imaging instrument is sensitive across more bands of light (13 multispectral versus eight), allowing it to discern more information about the Earth’s surface; and it will “carpet map” a much wider strip of ground (290km versus 185km).

In addition, its colour images have a best resolution of 10m, versus Landsat’s 30m.

Sentinel 2a will not be working at full pace straightaway: it is ramping up its coverage of landmasses, however experts have already confirmed that the early products are meeting the required quality.

Further quality improvements are under way. This could take a few months, said Esa mission manager Dr Bianca Hoersch.

“[As] for the user demand, as we see with Sentinel-1, there are more than 14,000 users. I would expect that with Sentinel-2 we will get more users, since the mission data – besides being valuable for operational services and science – is just simply stunning to look at and will attract the broader public.

“Our systems are scalable to absorb increasing demand [and] we are closely monitoring the access performance, e.g. today, the download of a product of about 5GB takes less than 10 minutes.”

Anyone thinking of downloading pictures is warned to have plenty of storage. The files are large. Mirror servers are being set up in several countries.

The next Sentinel to be launched in the EU’s multi-billion-euro Copernicus Earth observation programme is numbered 3a.

It will focus its gaze more on the oceans. The launch of this platform should take next month.

Even more spacecraft will follow in the coming years.

©“http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34593908”:http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34593908

(Friday, 04 December) The FINANCIAL — The World Bank and the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on December 3 that they will collaborate in using space-based Earth Observation – data and images provided by satellites – to reduce poverty, monitor environmental changes, and stimulate economic growth in developing countries. The two organizations signed a Memorandum of Intent (MOI) during the climate talks, COP21, taking place in Paris.


“Earth Observation is key to meeting our goals of ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner,” emphasized Laura Tuck, World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development. “New innovations of Earth Observation Technology will provide an invaluable source of data to monitoring the newly-approved Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in areas such as disaster risk resilience, urbanization, food security, greenhouse gases emissions, and forest inventories, among many others.”

The World Bank and ESA have been successfully collaborating since 2008, jointly implementing over 35 technical assistance projects that have been provided specialized mapping and monitoring tools in over 20 different countries. The projects have focused on areas such as forestry management, combating illegal fishing, monitoring coastlines for changing climate, and managing urban development.

The MOI signed on December 3 takes these initial experiences and expands the partnership to explore on a larger scale how satellite information can be integrated and mainstreamed into the projects and research of the World Bank. This expanded collaboration will focus on ten areas: water, agriculture, urban growth, oceans, disaster risk management, energy and extractives, forests, fragile states, and climate, according to the World Bank.

Recognizing this expanded scope, Tuck stressed that “The World Bank supports client countries in creating open databases and monitoring systems that include geospatial dimensions for better, more transparent evidence and data-driven decision-making. This partnership will enable the Bank and ESA to use data collected from the newer generation of satellites to find innovative solutions to country-specific and global challenges.”

“This collaboration with the World Bank opens a new user community for the geo-spatial information our satellites are delivering from space,” says ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Volker Liebig. “It will also support the development of investment projects to boost prosperity and inclusive growth. This is an excellent initiative for ESA and the World Bank, but especially for ensuring sustainable growth in the future.”

WB page

For more information, please see the “ESA – World Bank “Earth Observation for Sustainable Development” Partnership Report2:http://esamultimedia.esa.int/multimedia/publications/ESA_WB_Partnership_Report_2013_complete/

Earth observation data and information are vital to allow decision-makers and society in general to take informed decisions about climate, energy, food security, natural hazards, health and other societal challenges. These challenges are complex, interrelated, cross-border in nature and interdependent at the global scale and therefore coordination is essential to avoid duplication of efforts and reduce observational gaps.

he European Commission together with 27 EU Member States are active members of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), which provides a global voluntary framework where governments and participating organisations can coordinate their strategies and investments in the field of Earth observation while promoting full and open access to data and information through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).

This booklet provides a snapshot of EU-funded projects which illustrate how European research and innovation contribute to this global initiative, showcasing the potential of international collaboration in science for diplomacy.

A Decade of Success in Earth Observation Research and Innovation

Source

Partnership enhances ability to assess changing forest and to estimate greenhouse gas emissions

(1 December, Paris) – Google Maps and FAO have agreed to work closely together to make geospatial tracking and mapping products more accessible, providing a high-technology assist to countries tackling climate change and much greater capacity to experts developing forest and land-use policies.

Digital technology tapping into satellite imagery is revolutionizing the way countries can assess, monitor and plan the use of their natural resources, including monitoring deforestation and desertification.

“For FAO, this is not just a partnership. This is a strategic alliance,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva, noting it combines FAO’s global effort to combat climate change with Google’s commitment to help on the climate data science and awareness fronts.

The three-year partnership between Google Maps and FAO is designed to foster innovation and expertise and sharply broaden access to easy-to-use digital tools. It ushers in a major ramping up of existing collaboration between the two organizations and will boost the visibility and implementation of efforts to encourage sustainable environmental practices around the world.

“This partnership is powerful because it unites the complementary strengths of UN FAO and Google,” said Rebecca Moore, Director, Google Earth, Earth Engine & Earth Outreach. “FAO has decades of hard-won experience working on the ground in hundreds of countries on thousands of projects. Meanwhile, Google technology is at the cutting edge of big data, cloud computing, and transformatively-simple mapping tools. The FAO Collect Earth application brilliantly builds on top of Google Earth and Earth Engine to provide a simple but powerful global and national forest carbon monitoring tool, empowering countries as diverse as Chile, Panama, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Tunisia and Bhutan. We look forward to further strengthening this partnership in support of global climate action and sustainable development.”

Concretely, Google Maps will provide 1,200 trusted tester credentials on Google Earth Engine to FAO staff and partners, while also providing training and receiving feedback on users’ needs and experiences.

FAO will train its own staff and technical experts in member countries, upon their requests,, to use free and open source software tools developed within its Open Foris Initiative and using Google technology, for example Earth Engine.

The partnership foresees sharing knowledge and identifying needs that will broaden the kind of satellite data collected, broadening the focus to monitoring drylands and agricultural crop productivity.

Fast and user friendly

Monitoring forest cover and land-use change is destined to become increasingly important as countries around the world adopt measures to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

Open Foris tools have been developed with financial support from the governments of Finland, Germany and Norway. They help countries to obtain more detailed information about their own forest and natural resources in a more efficient manner than was possible before.

“Satellite images and products that used to take days to download and process can now be produced and visualized in a fraction of that time “ said Giulio Marchi, a forestry officer at the UN agency.

With the help of Google Earth Outreach, the technology company’s “Geo for Good” division, the Google Earth Engine has been made available through FAO’s Open Foris Collect Earth tool, which has been designed to make it easy even for people without prior remote-sensing experience to track land-use patterns and their changes over time and is already being deployed in more than 30 countries.

FAO’s Forest Assessment Management and Conservation Division has already trained hundreds of people around the world to use the tool in sample-based land cover assessments.

Basically, users can specify the kind of information they want to track, which is then sought among a vast set of remote sensing images of different resolutions, including a hefty archive of Landsat images dating back to 1972. Point-and-click methods allow users to zoom in on small areas and compare them to the same areas in the past.

For example, these images ( Image 1, Image 2 and Image 3) show the interface of Collect Earth together with Google Earth Engine to visualize the development of new crop fields in former grasslands along the Orange River in South Africa.

While remote sensing data often needs to be accompanied by “ground truth” information obtained locally, the result allows for closer monitoring of variables ranging from tree cover to greenhouse gas emissions.

Contact
Christopher Emsden
Media Relations (Rome)
(+39) 06 570 53291
christopher.emsden@fao.org

Source

Airbus Defence and Space and the German Ministry of Defence have signed a contract for the utilisation of TanDEM-X mission data, to update the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the Bundeswehr.

The agreement includes both licences for the utilisation of the global elevation data set covering the 150 Mio km² of the Earth’s landmass, and support services for data-management and data-editing, helping to access, edit, store and disseminate the impressive volume of data. Additional support and training will also be provided under the agreement, so users can reap the full benefits of this unique and homogenous global dataset.

The TanDEM-X Digital Elevation Model was acquired by the TanDEM-X Mission realised as a Public Private Partnership (PPP) between Airbus Defence and Space and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). It provides the first global, consistent, single-source and high-precision Digital Elevation Model, establishing a new standard for global elevation. Airbus Defence and Space holds the exclusive commercial rights for these data which are marketed under the name of WorldDEM and has developed a dedicated software tool for the adaptation of the elevation data to the needs of military and commercial users worldwide.

“We are proud of the trust shown by the German Ministry of Defence, which now becomes the first user of the global information provided through WorldDEM” says Evert Dudok, Executive Vice President of Communications, Intelligence and Security (CIS) Business Line at Airbus Defence and Space.

The 3D nature of the data provides an ideal visualisation tool indispensable for surveillance, reconnaissance and mission planning. The TanDEM-X Digital Elevation Model facilitates the interpretation of landscapes with exceptional detail, which is essential for military engineering projects and operational planning incl. mapping of obstacles, line of sight estimation and flight path/possible landing site planning.

Source ADS

This year IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest, Very High Temporal Resolution from Space, will use DEIMOS-2 Very High Resolution (VHR) multi-temporal data and HRC/Iris High-Definition Video from space. Both the VHR images acquired at two different dates and the video from an in-orbit camera cover an area over Vancouver (Canada). The data were acquired and provided especifically for the Data Fusion Contest by Deimos Imaging and UrtheCast respectively.

The Data Fusion Contest is organised each year since 2006 by the Data Fusion Technical Committee of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS). It is a challenging opportunity, open not only for IEEE members, but for every researcher interested to solve remote sensing problems with data obtained from a variety of sensors.

This year the contest aims at promoting progress on fusion and analysis methodologies for multisource remote sensing data. For this reason, Deimos Imaging (Spain) and UrtheCast (Canada) are providing the data sources to be used in the analysis. The data cover an urban and harbour area in Vancouver, Canada. Interested participants can register online and obtain the data sources which include:

Very-High-Resolution images from DEIMOS-2 acquired at two different days, before and after orthorectification (provided by Deimos Imaging). Panchromatic data will be delivered at 1 m spatial resolution point spacing, while multispectral data at 4 m. It is the first time that Deimos Imaging data are contributing to the challenge.

High-Definition Video acquired from the Iris camera installed on the International Space Station (ISS), at 1 m spatial resolution (provided by UrtheCast). It is the first time that participants of the contest will have a HD video from space available for their analysis.

The participants are free to choose their topic, which includes (but is not restricted to): registration (image to image, video to image), change detection, multi-temporal analysis, object detection and tracking (buildings, cars, vessels), image classification (multisensor or multiresolution).

Submissions to the contest are scientific papers presenting the research work done on these data. The best ones will be included in the Technical Program of IGARSS 2016, presented in an oral Invited Session, and published in the IGARSS 2016 Proceedings.

More information about the contest and how to register and obtain the dataset can be found in the following website: http://www.grss-ieee.org/community/technical-committees/data-fusion/data-fusion-contest/


Fig.1: The Data Fusion Contest figure featuring the multi-temporal DEIMOS-2 images and the HD video.


Fig.2: The DEIMOS-2 imagery of Vancouver (Canada) used for the Data Fusion Contest. Left: image acquired on 31 March 2015, right: image acquired on 30 May 2015.

Deimos Imaging

Deimos Imaging, a subsidiary of UrtheCast Corp., is a private Spanish company headquartered in Tres Cantos (Madrid) and with satellite control and processing facilities in Boecillo (Valladolid) and Puertollano (Ciudad Real). The company, one of the world leading satellite imagery provider, owns and operates DEIMOS-1 and DEIMOS-2 satellites, with a 24/7 commercial service from its three facilities in Spain and through a network of ground stations in Canada, Sweden and Norway.
www.deimos-imaging.com

UrtheCast Corp.

UrtheCast Corp. is an international technology company headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Working with partners across the globe, UrtheCast has designed, built, launched, installed, and now operates two Earth Observation (EO) cameras onboard the International Space Station (ISS), including the world’s first UHD full-color video platform from space. Video and imagery data captured by these cameras — the Ultra-HD video camera Iris, and thee medium-resolution camera Theia — is downlinked to ground stations across the planet and distributed directly to partners and customers, or displayed on the UrtheCast web platform.
https://www.urthecast.com/