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First images pave the way for commencement of operational data services by Earth-i providing dependable, very high resolution, daily global imaging opportunities.

Earth-i expects to begin offering full operational imaging and data services later this year from the DMC3/TripleSat constellation and will place specific focus on fast, easy and convenient access for data users.

Founded and run by prominent and experienced individuals from the Earth Observation industry, Earth-i is located in the UK close to the Surrey Space Centre, and the satellites’ manufacturer, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd.

Three identical <1m resolution optical satellites make up the DMC3/TripleSat constellation. Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology Co. Ltd (21AT) acquired the total capacity from SSTL in 2011 during a signing ceremony attended by the Chinese Premier and British Prime Minister. Subsequently, prior to the 10th July 2015 launch on an Indian PSLV-XL rocket, Earth-i signed an agreement with 21AT to become a strategic partner and master distributor.

The orbital position of the three satellites means the constellation is able to target any point on the earth’s surface at least once per day providing reliable and consistent information to data users, particularly useful for a wide range of applications including change detection.
The unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution, along with industry-leading technical specifications, will serve data users and support a wide range of applications in market sectors including oil and gas, security and defence, agriculture and construction.

Commenting on the news of the first images from the constellation, Richard Blain, CEO of Earth-i, said: “We are excited to be the enabling organisation, based in the UK, providing data users with access to the unique combination of spatial and temporal capabilities offered by this new British-built constellation. We recognise the need across multiple market sectors for high resolution images and data that are convenient and easy to access and supported by a range of innovative value-add services.”

He continued: “The announcement of the first images from the three satellites is an exciting milestone along the road to the beginning of full operational data services towards the end of this year.”

Press Release Ends

For further information, please contact:

Richard Blain
Chief Executive, Earth-i Ltd
Phone: +44 (0)333 433 0015
7 Huxley Road,
Surrey Research Park
Guildford, GU2 7RE
United Kingdom
E-mail: richard.blain@earthi.space

About Earth-i
Earth-i is a British company dedicated to facilitating the distribution of data from the DMC3/TripleSat Constellation. As the master distributor appointed by 21AT, Earth-i provides a portal for data users wishing to take advantage of the advanced data and services offered by this uniquely capable Earth observation satellite constellation.

Earth-i is co-located on the Surrey Research Park in the UK with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, the manufacturer of the DMC3/Triplesat constellation. www.earthi.space

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China on Monday quietly launched the Gaofen-9 high-resolution Earth observation satellite on a Long March 2D rocket from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre in the Gobi desert.

The launch went ahead at 12:42 Beijing time (04:42 UTC) with the only warning coming from a prior airspace notification. The successful launch was confirmed by state-run CCTV.

Gaofen-9 is the fourth to be launched from what is expected to be eight or nine satellites forming the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS).

Chinese state media report it will be used to provide sub-meter resolution optical images for use in land surveying, urban planning, land ownership, road network design, estimating crop yields, as well as disaster preparedness and reduction.

China High-resolution Earth Observation System

Gaofen-1 was the first in the series, and delivered a number of incredible hi-res, false colour images of land features in China. It was also involved in locating ‘dozens of illegal cross-border paths’ and the curious case of detecting the country’s largest-ever discovered marijuana plantation – which subsequently ‘disappeared’.

This was followed by the previous satellite, Gaofen-2, which launched on August 19, 2014. With a spatial resolution of 1 metre – the highest of the series – Gaofen-2 returned the stunning images below.

According to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), CHEOS is a planned advanced earth observation system with high spatial, spectral and radiometric resolution with the satellites placed in various orbits.

Approved in 2010, CHEOS plans to provide real-time, all-day global earth observation in any weather and is expected to be completed by 2020. The constellation may also be utilised in Chinese president Xi Jinping’s ‘One belt one road’ regional development project.

China’s 6th launch in 2015

The launch was China’s sixth for the year, following missions sending three Beidou global positioning satellites, Gaofen-8, Yaogan Weixing-27, and on Saturday the classified satellite ‘Communication Engineering Test Satellite One’ into orbit.

On September 19, China will launch the first of a new generation of rocket, the Long March 6, which uses new engines fuelled by relatively clean kerosene and liquid oxygen propellant, and will eventually replace the current launch vehicles which run on highly toxic hydrazine.

Next year the new heavy-lift Long March 5 and medium-lift Long March 7 rockets, designed to launch and service China’s future space station and perform lunar sample return missions, will make their debut launches.

Today’s launch was the 209th in the Long March series. The first, in April 1970, put China’s first satellite – Dong Fang Hong-1 – into orbit.

In an intense period of activity, China is expected to attempt around ten more launches before the end of 2015.

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The Sentinel-2A satellite has been in orbit for only a matter of weeks, but new images of an algal bloom in the Baltic Sea show that it is already exceeding expectations. Built essentially as a land monitoring mission, Sentinel-2 will also certainly find its way into marine applications.

©Sentinel-2A captured this detailed image of an algal bloom in the middle of the Baltic Sea on 7 August 2015. The image, which has a spatial resolution of 10 m, reveals the bloom in exquisite detail as well as a ship heading into the ‘eye of this algal storm’. The ship’s wake can be seen as a straight dark line where the bloom has been disturbed by the ship’s propellers. Image courtesy Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA

Warm weather and calm seas this August have increased the amount of biological activity in the central Baltic Sea, with the Finnish algae monitoring service Alg@line reporting a dominance of cyanobacteria in the region at this time.

The Baltic Sea faces many serious challenges, including toxic pollutants, deep-water oxygen deficiencies, and toxic blooms of cyanobacteria affecting the ecosystem, aquaculture and tourism.

The situation was so bad that in 1974 the Helsinki Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area was created to improve the state of the sea. Since then, the health of the Baltic Sea has improved dramatically.

Sentinel-2A was launched on 23 June, primarily to monitor land and vegetation for Europe’s environmental monitoring Copernicus programme. This new satellite carries a high-resolution instrument that covers 13 spectral bands with a swath width of 290 km.

This instrument is already exceeding expectations when it comes to monitoring the biology of coastal waters, as seen in these spectacular images of the central Baltic Sea taken on 7 August.

The images, showing detail down to 10 m across, reveal exquisite detail of an algal bloom.

Blooms in the Baltic Sea usually appear as a green-yellow soup or a mass of blue-green threads along density gradients within the sea. The streaks and filaments, eddies and whirls of biological activity are clearly visible in these new images.

Cyanobacteria have qualities similar to algae and thrive on phosphorus in the water. High water temperature and sunny, calm weather often lead to particularly large blooms that pose problems to the ecosystem and, therefore, aquaculture and tourism.

Toxicity varies between different species, but can also vary within the same species. Because of this, several teams monitor the status of blooms in the region using ships.

However, satellites can provide a synoptic view that ships alone cannot.

Sentinel-2A’s resolution of 10 m in multiple bands allows Copernicus services to monitor biological activity in the region. While it was optimised for land applications, it is clearly a valuable tool for monitoring ocean colour.

A ship can even be seen in the top image heading into the ‘eye’ of this algal storm. The ship’s track is visible as straight dark feature where the algae have been disturbed by turbulence created by the ship’s propellers as it mixes water in its wake.

Fine-scale filaments of biological activity reveal the vertical movement associated with ocean density fronts and dynamics.

ESA ocean scientist Craig Donlon said, “Sentinel-2A multispectral imager data of biological activity are delivered at a much higher spatial resolution than current operational numerical ocean prediction systems.

“This provides unique and complementary information to monitor the development of potentially harmful blooms.

“To support safe aquaculture and tourism we need to have better knowledge of the ecosystem and physical dynamics in the upper ocean, which is expressed in the horizontal structures we can see in the Sentinel-2A imagery.

“For example, the linear features in the algal bloom signature across the image suggest that internal waves are present. As these waves propagate and break, they energise the upper layers of the water column mixing typically deeper oxygen-depleted waters and change the distribution of the bloom.”

Betrand Chapron, scientific leader of ESA’s GlobCurrent project, added, “The challenge is to work with Sentinel-2 data in synergy with other satellite data. This includes data from Sentinel-1 and the upcoming Sentinel-3 missions to maximise our understanding of how the ecosystem develops and to provide warnings to decision-makers about harmful algal blooms.

“The upper-ocean vertical activity revealed through the fine-scale horizontal structures seen in the fantastic Sentinel-2 images and understating how the multiple-scale interaction of different ocean processes relates to ocean currents and dynamics, is frontier science that underpins the operational Copernicus Marine Environmental Monitoring Service.”

Fabrice Collard from Oceandatalab said, “To help discover and analyse this synergy between Sentinel-1, -2 and -3 together with other satellite, in situ and model datasets, an Ocean Virtual Laboratory is under development. This will exploit the fantastic Sentinel-2 data as soon as the commissioning is done.”

Harwell, Oxfordshire, 3rd September 2015 – Rezatec, the innovative landscape intelligence company, has been working with Northern Ireland Water to undertake an innovative study of its Dungonnell catchment, on the Garron Plateau, to the North of Belfast, using its cutting edge Earth Observation (EO) techniques. The aim of the project is to look at the integrity of peatland in the catchment area and its risk to water quality, as well as to provide a prioritisation assessment for restoration activities.

To measure peatland integrity Rezatec used a range of Earth Observation sensors from high resolution satellite imagery to ground based peat depth measurements, to analyse numerous aspects of peatland structure including the depth and volume of organic soil, the classification of vegetation types and the identification of man-made disturbances such as peat cutting and ditching.

With this focus on peatland degradation and disturbance and their subsequent threat to water quality, the project has provided Northern Ireland Water with risk assessments of the catchments to understand the extent to which the elevated quantities of carbon often found in degraded peat are contributing to the level of water treatment required to achieve Drinking Water Standards. Ultimately, this understanding will enable Northern Ireland Water to make decisions that will result in lower costs and better water quality.

Roy Taylor, Catchment Manager for Northern Ireland Water, commented: “This project has been a unique new opportunity to use cutting edge earth observation techniques to understand our water catchments. The project with Rezatec is giving us new insights into the environment from which we take our water supply, and how we can improve water quality and ultimately reduce water treatment costs by implementing the most effective restoration activities.”

Philip Briscoe of Rezatec added: “Our EO techniques have proved extremely useful in meeting the challenges of peatland management, giving Northern Ireland Water quantified information on ecosystem integrity presented through an online, interactive geospatial portal.”

Rezatec uses advanced, scalable techniques to offer what it has termed ‘landscape intelligence’, which takes large volumes of Earth Observation data and uses it to analyse environmental risk and changes in agricultural land use. Rezatec now works with five UK water companies, including Scottish Water and Bristol Water, leading the market in supporting catchment management by identifying potential threats to water supply, in particular from different sources of diffuse pollution such as degraded peatland and agricultural land use.

Editor’s notes

About Rezatec
Rezatec™ applies new science to Earth Observation (EO) data to produce high value data products that substantially reduce the cost of quantifying, monitoring and verifying land use change and environmental risk. Rezatec’s unique strength lies in its ability to aggregate large amounts of diverse data from satellite, airborne and ground instruments to provide critical decision support for science and non-science users. Headquartered within the UK Space Gateway in Oxfordshire, in the UK, Rezatec customers today are spread across the Water, Agribusiness, Energy, FMCG and Forestry sectors. For more information about Rezatec visit www.rezatec.com.

For editorial enquiries contact:
Philip Briscoe, Marketing Director, Rezatec Limited
Tel: 01235 567396, Email: philip.briscoe@rezatec.com

Ice shelves modulate Antarctic contributions to sea-level rise1 and thereby represent a critical, climate-sensitive interface between the Antarctic ice sheet and the global ocean.

Following rapid atmospheric warming over the past decades2, 3, Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves have progressively retreated4, at times catastrophically5. This decay supports hypotheses of thermal limits of viability for ice shelves via surface melt forcing3, 5, 6. Here we use a polar-adapted regional climate model7 and satellite observations8 to quantify the nonlinear relationship between surface melting and summer air temperature. Combining observations and multimodel simulations, we examine melt evolution and intensification before observed ice shelf collapse on the Antarctic Peninsula. We then assess the twenty-first-century evolution of surface melt across Antarctica under intermediate and high emissions climate scenarios. Our projections reveal a scenario-independent doubling of Antarctic-wide melt by 2050. Between 2050 and 2100, however, significant divergence in melt occurs between the two climate scenarios. Under the high emissions pathway by 2100, melt on several ice shelves approaches or surpasses intensities that have historically been associated with ice shelf collapse, at least on the northeast Antarctic Peninsula.

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Copernicus Masters prize boosts Stevenson Astrosat’s commercialisation of space sector

Success in the Copernicus Masters, the prestigious earth monitoring competition, has led to further opportunities for Stevenson Astrosat, one of Scotland’s most ambitious space services and management companies.

Last year, it won the Copernicus Masters Transport and Logistics Challenge from the Satellite Applications Catapult for its Transport Sentry, a product in development that will utilise space-based radar to detect landslides or subsidence in road or rail networks.

Transport Sentry uses synthetic aperture radar and optical satellites to examine road and rail links that have previously been identified as potential problem areas and quickly report damage back to a transport infrastructure operator.

It is a vitally important tool, especially in remote areas places with poor communications infrastructure and it is now achieving significant attention in Asia as a potential export product.

The Copernicus Prize was a milestone for Astrosat, which has, since inception, demonstrated its impressive capabilities in Earth Observation, Satellite Communications and Hardware Development.

The Edinburgh-based company has transformed the way space-based information can be used to bring previously unattainable benefits to energy, transport and aquaculture enterprises. It is also engaged in technology transfer and creating innovative spacecraft systems.

Success with Transport Sentry helped Astrosat to develop the Recovery and Protection in Disaster (RAPID) system, designed to provide valuable data sourced from every available satellite to allow a developing country to “plug the gaps” in their economies and provide large costs savings through greater resilience and recovery from disaster.

Astrosat’s RAPID digital maps allow users to interact and gain real time data. They provide an overview for clients by taking raw satellite data and translating it into a form that can be accessed and understood.

It also led to its Coastal Sentry product, focused on coastal erosion monitoring. Coastal erosion is a problem for coastal communities worldwide. As communities develop and utilise coastlines, more knowledge of how they are changing is key to ensuring safety and sustainable development. This product also has significant export potential.

Astrosat was founded by CEO Steve Lee, who has assembled a hugely-respected team of scientists with skill sets ranging across disciplines including astrophysics, astronautics, oceanography, hydrography and geoscience.

Its aim is to be at the forefront of the commercialisation of the space sector, helping its end users meet their needs in a sustainable manner using space technology.

Astrosat takes data from both geo-stationary satellites and polar orbiters and merges it with data mined from earth-based resources. This combination allowed the company to found ThermCERT, a thermal and carbon efficiency reporting tool which has now been spun off.

ThermCERT uses space-derived data to enhance quality and scanning frequency over the lifetime of a thermal investment and increases the effectiveness of carbon credits/trading.

It reduces thermal waste, particularly over large areas or in large buildings, and is vital in lowering global carbon emissions. It provides a suite of tools for targeting, measuring, reporting on, verifying, communicating and promoting thermal efficiency investments.

Astrosat is using similar data conflations and configurations to trial WaveCERT, which will allow marine renewable energy companies to decide on ideal locations for installation without the need for costly marine surveys.

WaveCERT extends Astrosat’s existing “CERT Suite” of renewable, low-carbon, space-driven technologies. Through the integration of space-derived oceanographic data with advanced numerical tools, WaveCERT aims to revolutionise marine surveying.

Other products include Field Aware, a mobile data centre in the field for use in disaster situations or simply operating in remote locations. It is designed to deliver important Earth Observation data direct to end users in the field so that informed decisions can be made where they are most needed.

Astrosat’s Geo-Secure product enhances communications security in the field. Communications security (especially via satellite) depends on good software encryption – but even the best codes can be broken. This service utilises satellite positioning systems to ensure the highest possible level of security.

The company is also developing an innovative solution for identifying space debris in the increasingly congested satellite zones above Earth. The Lifeless Space Beacon which could be carried by spacecraft and would transmit a signal which would let ground stations identify its position and track it, even if the satellite itself lost power.

Astrosat’s innovations have been award-winning since inception. It won the DLR Environmental Challenge in 2012 for ThermCERT and the Astrium Radar Challenge in 2014 for WaveCERT.

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Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) has signed an expanded satellite support contract with a total value of 205 MNOK (21,8 MEUR) with the European Space Agency for the Sentinel satellites in the Copernicus program.

KSAT has signed an expanded and extended contract for ground station support to the European Copernicus program. KSAT are to build and operate a new station in Inuvik in Canada, in addition to the activities at Svalbard. KSAT is the main supplier of ground station support for the EU-lead program for climate and environmental monitoring, Copernicus. KSAT is responsible for data collection from the six Sentinel satellites, and delivery of payload data to the relevant European organisations. KSAT has signed framework agreements related to this program with a total value of 68 MEUR. The duration of each contract is 3 to 5 years.

The first satellite, Sentinel-1a, is a radar satellite especially important to Norway since it is used in maritime surveillance in the northern areas. Data from this satellite can improve the safety and preparedness in the area. The satellite is used in operational services related to oil-spill monitoring, as well as ice- and ship detection. It constitutes a very efficient tool for Norway’s situational awareness in the northern most areas. Sentinel-2a, which supplies information for forest- and land purposes, will also use the station.

KSAT is providing services from its ground station on Svalbard, Norway, and from Inuvik in Canada from 2016. The antenna installations are controlled from the Tromsø Network Operation Center (TNOC), located by the company head office in Tromsø, Norway. The contract reinforces KSAT’s position as the world leading provider of services related to satellite data reception and control for satellites in polar orbit.

For further information, please contact:
President Rolf Skatteboe, telephone +47 91198985, or
CFO Alf Eirik Rokenes, telephone +4795058451

Monday 5 th october we had the pleasure of hosting two leading young Indian politicians at our headquarter in Tromsø.

Mr Sachin Pilot (Congress party) and Dr. Heena Gavit (BJP) are presently in Norway on a study tour arranged by the Norwegian Embassy in New Delhi, and in Tromsø, the politicians got a chance to explore the beautiful Norwegian nature, and learn more about the Arctic from The Norwegian Polar Institute and Kongsberg Satellite Services, KSAT.

At KSAT the guests could hear about how KSAT, through its unique polar ground stations, are able to capture data from anywhere in the world and also deliver analyzed information to end users on oil spill, vessel positions and ice movements only minutes after the satellite image is acquired.

KSAT and the Indian Space Agency ISRO have been working together for more than 10 years and KSAT is a proud provider of ground station services to a growing fleet of Indian satellite missions. RISAT-1 is an Indian satellite owned by ISRO and recently KSAT was granted the right by ANTRIX to schedule acquisitions, download, process, and deliver RISAT-1 imagery to commercial users worldwide.

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…features from MEOS, Sentinel-1A CollGS…etc

This issue features the:

  • ESA´s Instrument Processing Facility successfully integrated in our Collaborative Ground Segment solution
  • Tracking antenna for data reception and control for the Norwegian AIS Satellites
  • MEOS™ 3.8 m antenna installed at Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute, Bratislava
  • Sentinel-1A CollGS system delivered to Kongsberg Satellite Services

in addition to the upcomming events, latest contracts, newest upgrades and latest information from Kongsberg Spacetec.

You will find it here

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