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China launched a high-resolution optical Earth observation satellite Friday on top of a Long March 4B rocket, according to state media reports.

The Gaofen 8 satellite lifted off at 0622 GMT (2:22 a.m. EDT) from the Taiyuan space center in northern China’s Shanxi province. A 15-story Long March 4B rocket boosted the spacecraft into a near-circular orbit with an average altitude of around 473 kilometers, or 294 miles, according to U.S. military tracking data.

The orbit is inclined 97.3 degrees to the equator, and is similar to the orbit of China’s Yaogan 14 military spy satellite.

Friday’s launch occurred at 2:22 p.m. Beijing time.

Chinese officials said the Gaofen 8 satellite is part of a civilian program, joining the Gaofen 1 and Gaofen 2 Earth observation satellites launched from the Taiyuan space center in 2013 and 2014.

China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported imagery from Gaofen 8 will aid in general land surveys, land ownership evaluations, urban planning, road network planning, crop yield measurements, and responding to natural disasters.

The launch of Gaofen 8 was not officially announced in advance. Notices to pilots released Thursday outlining drop zones for the Long March rocket’s stages gave the first warning of an impending space launch.

Friday’s launch marked China’s second space launch of the year, and the 30th mission worldwide to successfully reach Earth orbit in 2015.

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SupremeSAT (Pvt) Ltd, a Sri Lanka-based satellite company, has broadened its scope to offer more services both locally and internationally after receiving the licence a few months ago for ‘International transit service’ from Sri Lanka’s Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC), a company official said.

The company was an influential entity in the previous regime with Rohitha Rajapaksa, the former President’s son, employed in its technical division. He continues in that position.

“The company is encouraged by the recent modification of its license by the TRC which will let SupremeSAT make Sri Lanka compete for export earnings with regional Teleports based in countries such as Singapore and India,” Chairman and Owner of SupremeSAT – R. M. Manivannan told the Business Times.

“Assisted solely by the Chinese companies during the inception, SupremeSAT is now developing long term partnerships with globally renowned companies worldwide,” Mr. Manivannan said.

He noted that USA’s IntelSAT SA, Swedish Space Corporation, USA’s Orbcomm, Ericsson and Russia’s Dauria Aerospace are a few of the companies to be linked up with SupremeSAT.

Its Kandy Satellite Earth Station called the “South Asian Space Academy – SASA” will be opened within the next two months. This Pallekele facility will not only control and monitor the fleet of satellites but also offer all types of Teleport services to other international space companies.

“SASA will be a local nerve centre for space related Research, Development and Training and thus will act as one of South Asia’s most vibrant space activity centres,” he said.

With the growth and expansion in the Telecommunication Satellite and Teleport arenas, SupremeSAT is focusing on building a constellation of low earth observation satellites.

It intends to offer high quality, most frequent satellite imagery to the farmers in Asia and Africa on FOC terms using these low earth observation satellites.

SupremeSAT expects to partner with the Ministry of Agriculture and kick start this project as early as next month.

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(By Andrew Rosenblum on June 25, 2015)A swarm of small satellites could give critical infrastructure an Internet connection that never goes down.

Anthony Previte, CEO of the space company Terran Orbital, was set on the path to his company’s latest project by a nurse he encountered amid the chaos of 9/11, one block north of Ground Zero.

She was running frantically down the street because the nearby hospital had run out of fuel oil. With most cell-phone batteries depleted and landlines knocked out, the only way to call for more was on foot. Previte got to thinking that important equipment like generators should have ways to communicate anytime, even after a disaster. Today he’s working to make that possible by launching multiple constellations of “nano satellites” designed to provide small, battery-powered sensors with a cheap data connection that never goes down.

Previte says his system will have many civilian and commercial applications and save lives in the wake of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. “If every generator has a sensor on it that reports back to a satellite, then whoever is in charge—FEMA, the government, the military—can move fuel around, with intelligent decisions,” he says.

More and more commercial and industrial equipment is becoming connected to data networks so they can be managed more efficiently, forming what’s known as the Internet of things. Terran’s always-on connections might make that approach more dependable.

Satellite Internet connections available today are mostly targeted at people, not machines, and they’re expensive. They use large satellites parked in geostationary orbits roughly 36,000 kilometers over the equator, meaning that significant energy is required to reach them with a signal from the ground.

Terran is launching small satellites that orbit at only 600 kilometers. That lower altitude makes it practical for low-powered, even disposable, sensors to use a satellite data link, says Previte.

The connection is designed to be more reliable than it is fast. The U.S. army is to use Terran sensors to track vehicles and troops that transmit at tens of kilobytes per second. But Terran expects lower-powered sensors to send up data at about a tenth that speed.

In addition to aiding in disaster relief and tracking shipping containers, planes, and boats, Previte envisions the sensors being used for environmental monitoring. For example, they could be dropped out of a helicopter or drone into a growing oil spill, or onto an active volcano to track lava flows. Terran anticipates significant interest from farmers, who could place sensors in fields or even around the necks of cows.

Previte estimates that Terran can build the disposable, low-powered sensors in bulk for roughly $80 each. Customers will pay a subscription on top of that for their connections. Terran will also sell complete satellites to customers who want the exclusive use of one. “It used to be $400 million for a satellite,” says Previte. Terran will be able to offer them for figures in the low millions of dollars, he says.

In addition to its deal with the U.S. Army, the company says it already has commercial clients, but none that are prepared to disclose their relationship publicly. Deploying a constellation of nano satellites requires 18 to 36 months of lead time, and these companies want to surprise the competition, says Previte.

Terran, which serves as a consultant to integrate satellite payloads and helps with mission control operations, will say that it supported the launch of nine satellites in 2014 and 10 so far this year. The company has also built six small satellites from scratch in 2015.

Jordi Puig-Suari, Terran’s chief science officer, is one of two inventors of the CubeSat, a generic blueprint for miniaturized satellites that are typically a cubic liter in size. Different payloads can be installed in a CubeSat using off-the-shelf electronic components (satellites traditionally have custom-built electronics). Further cost savings come from the way the small satellites can be fitted into unused space inside rockets launching larger satellites or space vehicles.

Kerri Cahoy, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said Terran’s model makes it distinct from most satellite companies.

The development of smaller, cheaper satellite technologies in recent years has led many companies to explore new ways of using low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Many focus on remote imaging—for example, to gather regular photos or infrared imagery. But Cahoy says LEO satellites should make a good low-cost communications network. “It sure beats trying to figure out how to connect a large number of distributed ground sensors to a cable or wire-based ground network,” she says. And satellites can more easily cover large swaths of territory than cellular or Wi-Fi networks, which need many base stations.

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(Jun 25, 2015) A key element of the partnership involves a major upgrade to Geoscience Australia’s Alice Springs satellite antenna which will see the station play a much more significant role in the international Landsat ground-station network.

On June 18, 2015 in Canberra, Australia, the U.S. Geological Survey and Geoscience Australia signed a comprehensive new partnership to maximize land remote sensing operations and data that can help to address issues of national and international significance.

“This partnership builds on a long history of collaboration between the USGS and Geoscience Australia and creates an exciting opportunity for us to pool resources across our organizations,” said Dr. Frank Kelly, USGS Space Policy Advisor and Director of the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center.

“We will work collaboratively to implement a shared vision for continental-scale monitoring of land surface change using time-series of Earth observations to detect change as it happens.”

Dr. Chris Pigram, Geoscience Australia’s Chief Executive Officer, also welcomed the agreement. “This new partnership elevates an already very strong relationship to a new level, and will see both organizations harness their respective skillsets to further unlock the deep understanding of our planet that the Landsat program provides.”

Dr. Kelly and Dr. Pigram both observed, “Our shared vision is to develop systems that enable us to monitor the Earth and detect change as it happens. The ability to do this will be critical to our ability to engage with major challenges like water security, agricultural productivity, and environmental sustainability.”

A key element of the partnership involves a major upgrade to Geoscience Australia’s Alice Springs satellite antenna which will see the station play a much more significant role in the international Landsat ground-station network.

Following this $3 million (AUD) upgrade committed to by the Australian Government, the Alice Springs antenna will transmit command-and-control signals to the Landsat satellites and support downloading of satellite imagery for the broader South East-Asia and Pacific region. Alice Springs will be one of only three international collaborator ground stations worldwide playing such a vital role in the Landsat program.

Dr. Kelly noted, “We are very pleased to see such a commitment from Australia to the future success and sustainability of the Landsat program. We appreciate the essential role that Australia continues to play in ensuring that Landsat data for this region is collected and then made available for societal benefit.”

The partnership will also include a strong focus on applying new science and ‘big data’ techniques, such as Geoscience Australia’s Geoscience Data Cube and the USGS’s land change monitoring, assessment, and projection capability, to help users unlock the full value of the data from the Landsat program.

Dr. Suzette Kimball, acting Director of the USGS, recently noted, “We are now beginning to see that the combination of high performance computing, data storage facilities, data preparation techniques, and advanced systems can materially accelerate the value of Landsat data.”

Dr. Kimball added, “By lowering barriers to this technology, we can enable government, research and industry users in the United States and Australia, as well as the broader world, to realize the full benefits of this open-access and freely available data.”

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[SatNews] The tremendous amounts of data produced by the European Earth observation program Copernicus and its Sentinel satellites hugely benefit science and public authorities and open the door to countless products and applications in a wide array of business sectors.

The annual Earth Monitoring competition Copernicus Masters was initiated to aid visionary entrepreneurs in bringing their innovations to market. Its CloudEO Going Live Challenge is now calling for proposals for EO-related products and services that are ready to be tested and implemented. Areas of special interest include ice detection, agriculture and forestry, oil, gas & mining, maritime, and radar applications.

Entrants are invited to submit a concrete plan for using CloudEO’s ecosystem to transform partially or fully developed applications based on Earth observation data into operational commercial services. After an initial evaluation by an expert panel, the top three contestants will be rewarded with the opportunity to conduct a reality check trial at the CloudEO Living Lab along with relevant user communities and potential future customers.

CloudEO is offering a powerful cloud-based hard- and software infrastructure, access to great data, an easy-to-use collaboration platform, sophisticated streaming services, a web store as a marketing tool, and CloudEO’s coaching and matchmaking support. The best service implementation will be awarded as the winner of the Copernicus Masters CloudEO—Going Live Challenge with a prize package worth up to 10,000 euros.

The winner of the challenge is also running for the overall winner—the Copernicus Master—who will receive (along with their challenge prize) 20,000 euros in cash and a satellite data package worth a further 60,000 euros, which is being provided with the financial support of the European Commission.

The Copernicus Master CloudEO The Going Live Challenge is open for online submission until the July 13th of this year. All winners will be announced on October 20, 2015, and recognized as part of an awards ceremony in Berlin.

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© copernicus.eu. To coincide with the release of the second phase of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS), an update to the EMS User Guide has been published to reflect changes to service and product specifications, as well as the transition from GMES to Copernicus.

This activity involved a study of user requirements and incorporated recommendations from the European Commission services DG GROW, DG ECHO, DG JRC and Member States.

Based on the findings of the study, the updated Copernicus EMS User Guide contains the following documents:

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ESA and CNES are pleased to announce that the new distribution site for SPOT-5 (Take 5) products is now open. The site also provides SPOT-4 (Take 5) data.

The experiment, co-funded by ESA and CNES, made SPOT-5 able to acquire data over 150 selected sites every 5 days under constant angles for a duration of around 5 months over the majority of the vegetation phase (April to August 2015). These time series will be made available very soon to the scientific community to support the development of time series analysis in preparation for the exploitation of the Sentinel-2 mission.

Images acquired during the SPOT-5 Take 5 experiment are processed at level 1C (orthorectified, TOA) and level 2A (orthorectified, BOA) 10 metres resolution. They will be available 3 weeks after sensing time.

Further information about the dataset is available on the SPOT-5 Take 5 description page

The product can be accessed from the SPOT Take 5 portal

All the SPOT-4 (Take 5) data are already available. SPOT-5 (Take 5) products will be ingested from next week on.

Data is accessible under free and open licence conditions upon user registration.

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Spacemetric announced early this year 2015 that the Board of Directors has appointed Mikael Stern as Group CEO and member of the Board of Directors effective immediately. Mikael was previously Senior Vice President Corporate Strategy at BlackBridge, Berlin, operators of the RapidEye constellation, and prior to this held a range of senior posts at SSC, Sweden, including several years General Manager, Satellite Management Services.


“As we enter a new era of incredible growth and innovation in the geomatics industry, there is no better person to lead Spacemetric,” said Lars Edgardh, Spacemetric Founder and Member of the Board of Directors. “Mikael is a proven leader with hands-on management skills, business vision and the ability to bring people together. His vision for how technology will be used and experienced is exactly what Spacemetric needs as the company enters its next chapter of expanded ambitions and growth.”

At SSC, Mikael steered his division to be by far the largest contributor to SSC’s 130MUSD annual revenues, and to become the world’s largest ground station network of its kind. During his leadership the division went from being a local satellite reception station to a global network of organisations offering satellite data reception and control services.

“Spacemetric is one of those rare companies with revolutionary technical solutions, and I couldn’t be more honored to have been chosen to lead the company,” Stern said. “The opportunity ahead for Spacemetric is huge, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster and continue to transform and grow. A big part of my job is to increase our ability to bring innovative solutions to many more customers.”

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BRUSSELS, June 24 (Xinhua) — Increased collaboration between Belgium and China in the field of satellite technology can put both nations “at the forefront” of delivering vital information globally, according to State Secretary of Science Policy Elke Sleurs.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) and China National Space Administration (CNSA) in the field of space sciences, technologies and applications was signed in Beijing on Tuesday.

In the pipeline is the Earth Observation program, which aims to design and build a joint Belgian-Chinese satellite mission “with the full potential to put both nations at the forefront in delivering exclusive agricultural and environmental information worldwide,” said Sleurs in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

The two countries have enjoyed a history of co-operation in the areas of science and technology, which is set to increase in the future, according to Sleurs.

“Building on the scientific co-operation between Belgian and Chinese scientists of the past years, especially in the field of the application of earth observation data for environmental monitoring, the idea grew to also involve technological and industrial partners in the co-operation,” Sleurs said.

For over 20 years, federal science policy of Belgium has supported the promotion of research projects between Belgian and Chinese universities, said Sleurs, as well as funding joint research projects with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.
bq. “I hope that more initiatives will follow,” said Sleurs, “so that both nations can demonstrate their unique competencies to Europe and the international world.”

More recently, specific focus has been given to projects dealing with remote sensing technologies, and the development of applications to monitor the state of the environment and agricultural land use, Sleurs said.

Science and technology is a key industry in Belgium. In 2014, the aeronautics and space industry in the country grew by 6 percent, while the federal government aims to devote 3 percent of its GDP to research and development.

“Belgium has set an objective of increasing the economic efforts of space research by enhancing SME participation in the space industry via technological and scientific support programs,” says Sleurs.

Belgium’s overall activities in the space sector represent an annual turnover of about 350 million euros (392 million U.S dollars), representing almost 2,000 high-quality jobs, she said. Enditem

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The 83rd meeting of the EUMETSAT Council in Darmstadt, Germany, on 23 and 24 June successfully concluded the approval process for the EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG) programme and achieved progress in the approval process for the optional Jason-CS programme.

Regarding Meteosat Third Generation (MTG), the Council approved the
contract with Arianespace for the first three launch services (MTG-I1, MTG-S1 and MTG–I2).

The Council also confirmed Alain Ratier as the Director-General of EUMETSAT for a further period of four years, until 31 July 2020. Ratier has served the organisation since 2011.

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