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(23 September 2014) MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) has been awarded a contract from DigitalGlobe to provide a ground station solution to an international customer to receive and process imagery and data directly from DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1, WorldView-2, and WorldView-3 satellites.

This is MDA’s first ground station solution to include WorldView-3 the first multi-payload, super-spectral high-resolution commercial satellite, which was successfully launched on August 13, 2014. The ground station is based on MDA’s multi-satellite architecture and can be extended to support additional satellites.

About MDA

MDA is a global communications and information company providing operational solutions to commercial and government organizations worldwide.

MDA’s business is focused on markets and customers with strong repeat business potential, primarily in the Communications sector and the Surveillance and Intelligence sector. In addition, the Company conducts a significant amount of advanced technology development.

MDA’s established global customer base is served by more than 4,800 employees operating from 11 locations in the United States, Canada, and internationally.

The Company’s common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol “MDA.”

(source: MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates)

As EARSC celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2014, we felt that this important occasion should be marked with a new initiative. We decided to introduce an award for the EO services company of the year. This would go to the company recognised by both its peers and international experts as having made a significant contribution to the growth of the EO services sector in Europe.

We were delighted that the EARSC members voting and the international experts both selected GeoVille as the first winner and that Christian Hoffmann – owner and founder of GeoVille – has agreed to give the interview for this edition of eomag.


Geoville

Christian, how do you feel about being the first winner?

We at GeoVille are very much honoured and proud of having received the EARSC 25th anniversary celebration award “European Earth Observation Company of the Year 2014”. It is the recognition of 16 years of passionate work and dedication to develop and provide innovative satellite derived geo-information products and services in response to our customer’s needs, always striving for an excellent price-quality ratio.

Tell us a bit about the history of GeoVille, how you started it and how it has grown over the years

The foundation of GeoVille Information Systems GmbH in 1998 coincided with the launch of GMES at the Baveno event. In its early years, GeoVille developed RegioCover, an innovative land mapping processing chain, which received the GMES Innovation Award in 2007. RegioCover paved the ground for the production of the first-ever operational GMES land monitoring product on soil sealing, tendered by the European Environment Agency.

As a privately owned, truly independent company, we have always been very flexible to new market trends. Moreover, we always employed the satellite data fittest for the application and understood that customers require end-to-end, yet easy-to-understand solutions for their environmental applications. Therefore, in 2007, we founded our sister company, GeoVille Environmental Services managed by Stefan Kleeschulte, and developed the Geographic Accounting product.

With our Geographic Accounting product, users can answer questions with a critical impact to public administrations or private businesses, such as how many people are affected by climate change, which critical infrastructures and ecosystems are exposed, and how large are economic risks as well as potential damages and losses.

Over the past few years, the RegioCover and Geographic Accounting products have successfully served our clients in International Financial Institutions. Given this recent success and the growing size of this market, in 2013 we established a representation in Washington D.C. to better access D.C.-based institutions such as World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Millennium Challenge Corporation and International Finance Cooperation.

When you started in business, what specific idea, purpose or vision was your driving force? Where does your strong entrepreneurial spirit come from?

As a boy, I was fond of ancient 17th and 18th century maps in old atlases that I received from my grandfather, where many parts of the world showed white as “unknown territory”. My dream was to uncover these remote areas. Prior to founding GeoVille I had the privilege to gain working experience at Intergraph Corporation in Amsterdam, the United Nations in New York and the Joint Research Center in Ispra, all of them dealing with specific aspects of the environment. Through this invaluable experience I have found out that I am best in business and this is what I realised with GeoVille.

Even if there are no more unsurveyed areas in the strict cartographic sense, only with GeoVille my dream became a reality. Today its “environmental monitoring” and this is a rapidly growing market, where space can make a unique contribution.

What you would say about your leadership style? What is “your take” on the general notion that entrepreneurs should build a business around what they actually love to do?

I am feeling deeply grateful for being able to turn my boyhood dream into reality. We in GeoVille are a fantastic team of likeminded ambitious colleagues and in running the company, I see myself as ‘the first among equals’. Recently, we learnt from WikiLeaks that GeoVille is considered a ‘boutique’ Earth Observation company, successfully serving a niche market within Europe’s space industry. I would call this “good intelligence work”!

What was the greatest challenge you encountered when you started and how was it overcome?

The biggest challenge was securing the venture capital at the time of starting the company. At this time, hardware facilities were still very expensive. Once I convinced my co-owners to invest jointly, everything went smooth – 16 years of steady growth from a one-person company to a head count of 45 in 2014 with a turnover well above 4 Mill €. In all those years not one customer was left behind.

Please tell us very simply what GeoVille does?
GeoVille starts where traditional mapping ends! For customers, we do the spatial job through satellites’ eyes and provide geographic accounting solutions. Our geo-information products fulfil the highest quality standards so that our customers can concentrate on their core business.
What are the key markets that GeoVille addresses?
Our focus is on land monitoring and environmental accounting with a strong international development aspect. In the last 16 years, we have successfully implemented projects in more than 120 countries world-wide.
Sectors of impact comprise a variety of land-related applications, such as agriculture, energy & extractives, environment & natural resources, forestry, natural hazards, urban, rural & social development and water management.
What do you consider are the most important competences of GeoVille that help you succeed in the market?
The key asset is our team a group of highly qualified and motivated experts willing to engage with the challenges of the new digital era and to go extra lengths for guaranteeing full customer satisfaction.
What do you see as the main challenges facing you as CEO of GeoVille in the next 1-2 years?
Looking over daily news, we see that our world is in full motion. With our geospatial solutions, we bring tangible benefits to our clients in their efforts to assure better living standards for people and safeguard environmental conditions.
Internally, recruitment of experts is always an issue. In the short term we are facing the challenge to come up with attractive packages so that we encourage Earth Observation and Geoinformatics professionals to join our team at GeoVille.
On the financial side, companies all over Europe suffer from a bad payment moral, and the financial crisis has not made access to venture capital easier.
On data issues, access to Sentinel data is on a critical track. The Sentinels are a fantastic opportunity for European companies and we will have a unique system in place to improve environmental monitoring. Unfortunately, to put it bluntly, the Copernicus ground segment primarily serves European large scale services. Other users and particularly SMEs are left behind thereby creating a massive loss of opportunities for society and not fully capitalising on prior investments.

MARKET VIEWS

Where do you see the greatest opportunities for growth in the near future?

Certainly, Copernicus offers a big opportunity. It’s about transforming a fragmented market today into a consolidated growth market serving real public needs. The application business has been dominated by one-off projects, and those low-margin projects did make it hard for companies to grow. The agricultural controls established in the late 1980s are a good example on how a European push can create a success story and a sustainable market. My prospect for Copernicus follows this line and this is why we have engaged in this program right from the start. On the commercial market I see land related opportunities predominantly in the renewably energy business and in ecosystem service assessment and valuation.

Are there any issues, positive or negative, that you consider may affect the evolution of the market you are addressing?

I am seriously concerned about unfair competition issues from publicly financed service providers responding to tenders. Clear lines would need to be drawn and unfortunately, in our sector this is too often not the case. As industry has recently highlighted through an EARSC position paper, the way in which Copernicus Services will be procured will have a very important influence over how companies can participate to the programme. De-facto monopolies resulting in single bids only must be avoided at all cost.

At the moment, innovation seems to be on everyone’s list of things to promote, what is your perception of innovation in the EO services sector? In what ways is innovation important to GeoVille?

These days innovation is too often linked to the price alone, with the aim to produce more for less money. We need to break this progressing paradigm where “less cost” is associated with being “innovative”. Unfortunately, quality issues are left behind, for the disadvantage of the end-users. Big data and Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, pose a big opportunity to implement new purchasing mechanisms thereby reinventing innovation and making sure that the European EO industry stands at the forefront of technology.

What concerns do you have; are there threats that you see for your business?

In business, threats need to be turned into challenges – or even better – into opportunities; otherwise you are swiped away from the market. I see plenty of opportunities for the European service industry as there will be a range of new data available from commercial providers and from the Sentinels. The latter will be freely available and time is ready to multiply what has successfully been delivered to one customer. The Earth Observation market must move from single showcases to ubiquity.

After all the EO industry has quadrupled its turnover since 2000 and the framework conditions are excellent for this growth to continue.

One word of concern: Access to Sentinel data must be solved. Not on the theoretical side but with regard to the practical implementation in the Member States.

EO SERVICE DEVELOPMENT AND STAKEHOLDERS

In the EO services sector, governments can have a strong influence over the way business develops. Aside from being a good customer, what’s the one other thing governments can do to support the development of the sector?

Governments can steer the ‘demand’ side, for example by implementing environmental reporting obligations. Such reporting obligations will guarantee that goals are controlled and met and thereby help the environment and create a whole set of socio-economic benefits. Moreover, such reporting obligations will help to move from “nice to have” products to information that is required by law and therefore repetitively requested. In this respect, governments are well advised to promote the ‘supply-side’ as well, fostering the development of new competitive, cost-effective quality minded solutions through public research programmes.

Furthermore, national space programs focusing on technology development and applications can also be a good way to develop a niche position. The Austrian Space Application Program now in its 10th year of implementation is such an example. Measures should address in supplier/customer projects the ability to sell and the willingness to pay.

EARSC is the European trade association dealing with the geospatial services sector; in your opinion, what for you are the main benefits of EARSC membership?

For GeoVille it is important to be a Member of EARSC, because EARSC is the only organisation promoting the interest of the European EO industry and underpinning its market position vis a vis non-European players and also the increasing market distorting competition from European public institutions.

FUTURE

Finally, what can you say about your outlook for the sector and how companies in this sector should be positioning themselves?
  
In the last months I have seen in the commercial and public domain many successes overcoming the single most important barrier, which is lack to a broad market access. Imagine that we have been able to win bids and successfully work as an SME in more than 120 countries in four continents. I call this a fantastic outlook for GeoVille and the European EO industry.

Our business will move from single small-scale opportunities to Big Data and this is why we at Geoville have invested to become partner to a supercomputer network allowing us processing four petabyte of data per year. This will bring us closer to surveying the last remaining unknowns of our planet, and to provide even more competitive solutions to our clients. Finally, we need to bring our results closer to the people and their digital devices, for example through online web mapping platforms. Such new communication lines pose a big opportunity for implementing new business concepts and a chance for the industrial players in Europe.

Last but not least SME’s such as GeoVille are the source of growth, employment and innovation in Europe. Therefore, it is of key importance that Copernicus tendering takes this into account by making bidding volumes accessible for SME’s. This can be achieved for instance via individual lots rather than single large contracts and by setting clear rules prohibiting unfair competition from publicly financed service providers.

Biography

Christian Hoffmann holds a doctorate degree from the University of Vienna and is the founder of GeoVille Group, a company specialising in products and services related to Earth Observation (EO) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications. He has 25 years of experience in earth observation and GIS applications working prior to GeoVille for the United Nations in New York, the Joint Research Center in Ispra and Intergraph in Hoofddorp.

British satellite imaging company DMC International Imaging Ltd (DMCii) today announced the completion of its Flagship project to develop a global system using Earth Observation (EO) satellite data to measure land carbon storage and how it changes over time.

The project, supported by Innovate UK (formerly known as the Technology Strategy Board) was developed with consortium partners Rezatec Ltd Landscape Intelligence data services provider and University College London (UCL), world-renowned remote sensing and carbon sequestration researchers.

The consortium was able to develop and deliver a unique approach to assimilating and transforming EO data from different sources and resolutions to calculate tropical forest carbon stock worldwide and provide a platform for carbon fluctuation modelling.

The project developed an online model representation of the tropical forestland class on a global scale.

The model uses Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) outputs, from the NASA MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument, combined with ground data to emulate contemporary forestland classification distribution across the tropical portions of the globe.

The model was designed to form the baseline for monitoring trends in forest cover and associated carbon stock quantification over time. The model software environment has been developed to assimilate ground data from multiple sources so that carbon stock calculations for a given area of interest can be further trained for enhanced local accuracy using minimal ground plots.

The challenge the project sought to overcome was in reducing the high levels of error and uncertainty inherent in using coarse resolution EVI/NDVI inputs to drive quantitative assessments of carbon stock.

Using a combination of highly optimised statistical processing algorithms developed by Rezatec on the CEMS (Climate, Environment and Monitoring from Space) facility at the Satellite Applications Catapult in Harwell and EO data modelling approaches developed by UCL and DMCii, error and uncertainty in this area has been substantially reduced.

Accurate carbon stock measurement is critical to effective landscape management in the bio-fuels, agriculture and forestry sectors. Using the model for online processing of user ground data can significantly lower the costs of carbon stock measurements and overall landscape monitoring. This is of particular economic benefit for use in supporting auditing mechanisms such as MRV (Monitoring, Reporting and Verification) where physical audit costs are high relative to the tradable value of the underlying asset.

DMCii, focused on the data transformation element of the project, developing an EO processing system to produce high resolution surface reflectance data supported by a data and metadata repository which interfaced through an API to the main platform.

Rezatec was responsible for the construction of a global tropical forest carbon stock model using surface reflectance satellite data at varying resolutions as a key input for processing alongside other data sets such as digital elevation model outputs and biomass data

UCL focused on the scientific analysis of the carbon data at both the model level and the data sources used as inputs to the model to quantify the uncertainties involved and supply users with valuable quality assurance information.

DMCii Managing Director, Dave Hodgson, says: “We are committed to enabling better monitoring of global change from space. Together with a great team we’ve made big steps in pushing forward real products that can be applied to monitoring and measuring land carbon with commercial and national satellites.”

Patrick Newton, Chief Executive Officer of Rezatec, commented, “We are very pleased to have been invited to participate in this highly innovative project. The carbon stock data we have developed as a result of completing this initiative represent key components in our overall library of landscape intelligence data products and have use across all the sectors in which we operate.

Professor Mark Maslin of University College London, concluded, “This project has allowed us to develop an accurate and cost effective means of annually monitoring tropical forest carbon storage and fluctuation. This will not only stimulate the global market in land carbon credits but will provide a means of measuring our effectiveness in protecting existing forest and reforestation. Both of which are essential if we are to prevent environmental degradation and reduce the effects of climate change.”

— ends —

About DMC International Imaging Ltd

DMC International Imaging Ltd (DMCii) is a UK based supplier of remote sensing data products and services for international Earth Observation (EO) markets. DMCii supplies programmed and archived optical satellite imagery provided by the multi-satellite Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC). DMCii’s data is used extensively in a wide variety of commercial and government applications including agriculture, forestry and environmental mapping.

DMC International Imaging Ltd is not affiliated in any way with Intergraph Corp., Z/I Imaging Corp., or their registered trademark DMC.

About Rezatec

Rezatec was formed in 2012 to help businesses better manage their land-based assets by making use of the increasingly sophisticated but complex array of Earth Observation (EO) imagery and data available. We do this through our unique landscape intelligence platform aggregating large amounts of diverse data from satellites, airborne and ground instruments, applying relevant modelling and using our mapping, measuring and monitoring techniques with best-in-class technology to provide critical decision support for our customers. Customers today are spread across the Agribusiness, Biofuels, Energy, Water, Forestry and FMCG sectors. www.rezatec.com.

Notes to editor:This press release can be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/dmciipr

Press contacts:
DMCii: Nathalia Santos, BCM Public Relations, www.bcmpublicrelations.com
Tel: +44 (0)1306 882288 Email:n.santos@bcmpublicrelations.com
Dave Hodgson, Managing Director, DMCii, www.dmcii.com
Tel: +44 (0)1483 804299 Email: d.hodgson@dmcii.com

Rezatec: Philip Briscoe, Rezatec,
Tel: +44 (0)1235 567396 Email: philip.briscoe@rezatec.com


Dr. Gediminas Vaitkus is the owner of Geomatrix UAB, a small Lithuanian company that has successfully participated in the development of Copernicus core services. It specialises in automated geospatial data processing. Now that the Sentinels are being launched, we asked Dr. Vaitkus about his point of view on the prospects the Sentinels bring for small and medium businesses.

Eurisy (EY): What are the main threats European SMEs are confronted with when it comes to making commercially viable geo-information products from Sentinel data?

Dr. G. Vaitkus (GV): I would like to call out three of them, though of course the situation is more complex than a 3-bullet point list.

  • 1. Stakeholder interests and resistance to changing from “traditional” (human photo-interpreted) geo-information products: Although the efficiency, objectivity, frequency and thematic variety of Copernicus products and services cause no doubts, the traditional mapping methods hold strong positions on an institutional level, with institutional users or even large service providers who are in a position of national monopoly. Annual expenses of the public sector for mapping products and services are certainly large enough for the traditional mapping lobbyists to defend their “economic interests”.
  • 2. European and national legislation and procurement policies are not in line with the most recent technological developments related to Copernicus. In many European countries legislation makes topographic mapping compulsory, focusing national funding on established priorities and methods, which leaves little room for innovation. This is actually the main problem for Copernicus service providers, more than technological competition with traditional mapping methods. Legislators do not seem to be in tune with those in charge of investing European money in innovative mapping methods, like those based on the use of satellite imagery. You would think that these questions of legislation and procurement policies should have preceded the implementation of Copernicus, but nowadays that seems to be an after-thought.
  • 3. Low accessibility of high quality multi-spectral imagery for the European service providers. This is a complex problem, including insufficient spatial resolution and spectral parameters of the imagery publicly available for the GMES/Copernicus initial operations, low revisit frequency (problems with cloud cover), high cost of very high resolution imagery (almost the same as aerial photos), etc. This problem is even worsened by on-line global imaging services like Google or Bing, which provide visualisations derived from very high resolution imagery for the general public globally and for free. So the result is that (1) the mainstream users have an extremely “populist” understanding of what EO technology really is and what information it can provide, at the same time being confident that they already have unlimited and free access to the best available EO technologies and (2) EO industry has serious problems trying to satisfy the expectations of the European (or national) institutional users in terms of high quality EO products and services with the EO data available for the real production. I do hope that Sentinel 2 will at least partially solve the latter problem, but the education of the general public still remains a serious issue for the Copernicus community at all levels.

EY: What about the bright side?

GV: There are a few reasons to remain hopeful.

  • 1. European SME capacity building. During the last years some European companies have indeed developed highly competitive technological capacities for EO services. And — surprisingly — the constraints of the European EO market (weak user community, low budgets, changing specifications, poor imagery, problems with many national projections, etc.), have actually pushed innovation and reinforced the competitiveness of European EO service providers on the global market! 5 years ago the FP7 GMES projects raised very ambitious (at that time) objectives to reduce the land-cover production costs by 20% compared to CORINE Land Cover production based on manual photo-interpretation, or even reduce the production cost down to 1-2 Euro/sq.km for ~10 “core” land cover classes. However, the actual production of GIO-Land layers was done for just a few cents/sq.km per layer — several times cheaper than the original expectations. Despite all the semantic issues, delays, diversity of national projections, inconsistency of EO imagery and other problems, the pan-European production was completed successfully by a collaborative effort of a large group of European companies, coordinated by the European Environment Agency. This achievement gives strong evidence of the competitiveness of the European EO industry and competences of public agencies.
  • 2. The promising prospect of access to global markets. Without exaggeration, European Copernicus service providers have indeed developed a capacity for serious competition on a global market. And, to be honest, the main reason why we (service providers) are so keen to finally have European EO imaging capacity (Sentinels) operating in full power is not because we expect a considerable boost of business opportunities in our own countries, but because we hope that EC will finally develop a political will to start acting as a global player on climate change, deforestation, desertification, water resources, food security and many other issues by launching large scale operational mapping and land/ocean monitoring services on a global scale, like US, Japan, China and other countries. Europe has no problem with innovation, technological capacity or even funding – I believe that with Copernicus services our main problem is lack of political will and coordination… But hopefully that is about to change.

EY: How representative do you think your view is of how SMEs in general perceive Copernicus’ opportunities?

GV: I’m not sure. My point of view – as one of a former scientist and current CEO of a micro-company competing for business in the field of EO services – is probably a pragmatic, business-like approach to the Copernicus programme. I do realise that on a European level this has been a very ambitious project on a larger time-scale than the one I consider, as a small business owner. Long preparation for the Copernicus operational phase through RTD projects demanded a considerable amount of investment and human resources from large EO service providers, but the overall level of GMES initial operations funding apparently didn’t meet expectations of the European EO industry. On the other hand, SMEs are operating on considerably lower level of expenses, therefore long-term Copernicus services and national downstreams provide attractive business opportunities for micro-companies and SMEs.

See more at

19th -21st January 2015 | QEII Conference Centre, London
www.dgieurope.com

DGI is the most significant event in Europe for the national security community and intelligence experts exploiting location information for local, national and coalition national security programs. Focusing on how key decisions are supported through the provision of location intelligence (http://wbresear.ch/earscag) but embracing ever wider information superiority needs, DGI serves the sharing of information and networking needs of government and industry leaders from across NATO, Europe and international mission partners.

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The EO wiki is a website whose users can add, modify or delete its content, depending on their rights. It is part of the EO Portal devoted to applications and everything about the products and services offered by the EO services industries.

For more information on the EO Portal and the full range of content together with the groups which have access, see About the EO Portal

The EO Wiki has been organised according to the EARSC taxonomy so that at the heart of the structure is a list of EO products organised into thematic areas and also assigned to market sectors. These two views are the first way to approach the database.

Then for each service there are 4 tabs ie areas of informations:

  • Applications; where content has been placed in the EO wiki then this tab should appear first. The goal is to assemble all information about that particular product or service (yes an ambitious goal!).
  • Products; this is in tabular form and contains linked information about documents that define this product. Since there may be variations or particular products then there may be multiple rows. The columns show:
    - the source of the information if it is appropriate.
    - A description of the product
    - A link to a product specification if one exists
    - Links to descriptions of any projects that have helped define the product.
  • Success Stories; this provides an array of any success stories that help to illustrate where the product has been used comprising a picture and very short description to identify the case.
  • References; which gives a list in tabular form of papers or research that help define the product or thematic area.

The EO wiki then also contains a listing of the applications and projects.

if you wish to sign-up simply fill in a request via the log-in page www.earsc-portal.eu

The GOFC-GOLD – Land Cover Project Office has released another newsletter

*REDD Sourcebook update

  • REDD+ curriculum
  • Sentinel-2 for Science Work shop
  • Sentinel-1A launched
  • First release of MGD from GFOI 3 REDD sourcebook & GFOI MGD
  • Global Reference Datasets
  • LC4Climate Project from USDI
  • Free access to SPOT archive
  • GLC side-event GEO Summit X
  • GOFC-GOLD at ESA LPVE Workshop
  • Calendar

link

(7 July 2014) Ocean waves, the hot sun, sea breezes — the right combination makes a great day at the beach.

A different combination makes a killer hurricane. The complex interactions of the ocean and the air above it that can create such different outcomes are not yet fully known. Scientists would especially like to understand the role that the daily heat of the sun plays in creating winds.

In a few months, NASA will send an ocean wind-monitoring instrument to a berth on the International Space Station. That unique vantage point will give ISS-RapidScat, short for the International Space Station Rapid Scatterometer, the ability to observe daily (also called diurnal) cycles of wind created by solar heat.

Winds contribute to motion in the ocean on every scale, from individual waves to currents extending thousands of miles. They affect local weather as well as large-scale, long-term climate patterns such as El Niño. Across the tropical Pacific, winds help or hinder local economies by allowing nutrient-rich water to well up from the ocean depths, nourishing marine life to the benefit of coastal fisheries, or blocking its upwelling.

Since the hours of daylight are totally predictable, you might expect their influence on winds to be equally obvious. But that’s not the case. According to Sarah Gille, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, “There’s an enormous amount of diurnal wind variation between 30 degrees north and south of the equator, and we don’t understand the timing. It’s clear that the winds aren’t just triggered every day at noon [when the sun is highest].”

Scatterometer observations from satellites have proven invaluable for understanding ocean winds. A scatterometer is a type of radar that bounces microwaves off Earth’s surface and measures the strength and direction of return signals. The more uneven the surface, the stronger the return signals. On the ocean, higher winds create larger waves and therefore stronger return signals. The return signal also tells scientists the direction of the wind, because waves line up in the direction the wind is blowing.

more info

The Nano and Microsatellite market report constitutes of revenues from hardware, software and services required for the development and launch of such satellites. Overall market size is found by adding up the market size for two segments of satellites; namely 1kg to 10kgs (Nano satellites) and 11kgs to 100kgs (Microsatellites).

Though above two markets can exist independently, but the playing fields are the same. For example, there are applications in communication, earth observation, remote sensing, biological experiments, scientific research, academic training, space science and intelligence among various others. Among all applications of Nano and microsatellites, earth observations and remote sensing is expected to account for highest market share by 2019.

Few high growth markets are:-

1. Software and data processing: Software packages as well as data processing suites that are required for accepting and extracting actionable information from the raw satellite data at the ground station

2. Nano satellites: Satellites in the range of 1kg to 10kgs

3. Earth observation and remote sensing: Disaster monitoring application such as cyclones, storms, floods, fires, volcanic activities, earthquakes, landslides, oil slicks, environmental pollution, industrial and/or power plant disaster among various others

4. Commercial: Nano and Microsatellites built and used for commercial purposes

One challenge that may hamper the expected double digit growth of this market is raising capital by startups and small sized companies as every machine, every orbiting device, cost thousands of dollars; every major technology investment has been a bet-the-company adventure. Thus finding the right area along with economically feasible and profitable area holds the key to success in this field. Inability to obtain financing could possibly delay or cancel satellite programs. According to survey reports about 60 percent of U.S. commercial satellites have been financed by U.S. based Ex-Im Bank and are planning to enhance its support for U.S. industry in anticipation of its aggressive competition, in funds provided for satellite exports worldwide, from its European counterpart, Coface. However, uncertainty in global financial markets creates mixed results for funding in satellite services sector business. Debt markets are still strong while traditional investors remain risk averse in perspective to markets for satellite financing.

There are various assumptions also that have been taken into consideration for market sizing and forecasting exercise. A few of the global assumptions include political, economic, social, technological and economic factors. For instance, exchange rates, one of the economic factors, are expected to have moderate rating of impact on this market. Therefore, dollar fluctuations are expected to not seriously affect the forecasts in the emerging APAC regions.

The report will help the market leaders/new entrants in this market in the following ways

1. This report segments the market into solutions and applications covering this market comprehensively. The report provides the closest approximations of the revenue numbers for the overall market and the sub-segments. The market numbers are further split across the different end users and regions.

2. This report will help them better understand the competitor and gain more insights to better position their business. There is a separate section on competitive landscape, including competitor ecosystem and mergers and acquisition. Besides, there are company profiles of 10 players in this market. In this section, market internals are provided that can put them ahead of the competitors.

3. The report helps them understand the overall growth of the market. The report provides information on key market drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities.

There is an ongoing tussle among the eminent players such as Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Ruag, Sierra Nevada corp and Surrey satellite technologies in the nano and microsatellite market.

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