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Sinergise: A Slovenian company is creating new business opportunities by optimizing data mined by the EU’s Copernicus programme from outer space.

The European Union’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme is probably the best mapping system in the world. It is also a great tool for innovative entrepreneurs. They can use the data gathered by the programme to create new products and new services — and the jobs and customers that go with them.

But first they have to know how to optimize the incredible mine of information provided by Copernicus’ satellites. That’s where Slovenian SME Sinergise comes in.

Backed by European funds from the Horizon 2020 programme, company founder Grega Milčinski and his teams have developed a solution called Sentinel Hub.

“With Copernicus, the amount of data has changed significantly, and these data, which are free and good quality, and useful for many cases, are also data which are technically complex,” Milčinski says. “With Sentinel Hub, we made it easier and more efficient to use”.

Sinergise’s customers include the global manufacturing giant Claas, a German company that makes agricultural machinery.
Thanks to Sentinel Hub, Milčinski has developed Crop View, an application that allows new generation agricultural machines to be even more efficient.

“Crop View uses Copernicus data to detect differences in vegetation health and development state within any farmers’ fields boundaries,” explains Friedemann Scheibler, who works on specialist precision farming for Claas e-services.

“With this information, users get the opportunity to create application maps in a very easy and efficient way, download them, and put them directly on their machine”.

Scheibler says he is very happy with the application. First, because it was developed in just six months; and second, because it provides real added value for its customers.

“You will produce higher yields and better crop quality. You increase the efficiency of applied resources, such as fertilizers. And you limit your environmental (impact), through a more sustainable working practice”.

As for the Sinergise, it hasn’t stopped expanding: From eight employees 10 years ago, that number has grown to 45 today.

It also has customers all over the world.

“We have almost 5,000 users, ranging from a small orchid farm in South Africa to the large organisations like the EU satellite centre,” Milčinski says. “All of them are using Copernicus data to empower their business models. I like it!”
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EOMAP has been awarded a contract for providing Satellite Derived Bathymetry for seven atolls of Tuvalu — the project was awarded through a competitive bid contract issued and overseen by the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO).

Acoustic or Lidar survey campaigns usually involve long lead times and physical site surveys to collect water depth data resulting in environmental impacts and high costs. Satellite Derived Bathymetry overcomes these hurdles by deriving fit-for-purpose grid resolutions within a limited budget and with the benefits of creating extended coverage within short time. It allows creating bathymetric data without physically being in the area of survey. The demand of accessing bathymetric data for shallow water zones in combination with the cost and time limitations of ship and airborne survey methods have led to high interest in this technology as an effective surveying tool.

The project is being completed on behalf of the Tuvalu Government. The funding is provided under the UK Government’s Commonwealth Marine Economies Program, which aims to support sustainable growth of Commonwealth Small Island Developing States (SIDS) within the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean Regions. As a SDB framework provider for the UKHO, EOMAP won a competitive tender to provide SDB data of Southern Antigua in 2015. The shallow water data was included in the ADMIRALTY Navigational Chart of the area, and the grids are valuable datasets for coastal engineering companies, coastal zone managers and environmental impact studies.

Dr. Knut Hartmann, Director Client Services at EOMAP, said that satellite Derived Bathymetry (SDB) is a new technique using modern satellite capabilities to provide remote, rapid and dense bathymetric information over extended areas. He explained that unlike other survey methods, it offers remote mapping of shallow water zones and supports applications such as safety of navigation, reconnaissance surveys, coastal zone management or hydrodynamic modelling. SDB uses the intensity and spectral composition of reflected sunlight from the seafloor to derive information about water depth. High-quality SDB services rely on sophisticated data processing algorithms. Based on more than 20 years of developing and supplying shallow water bathymetric data, EOMAP is a service provider for the coastal and offshore industry, academia and international organizations.
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EARTH-i, one of Europe’s most prominent New Space companies, has been awarded a grant of £2.7 million from the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme, which supports UK space firms tackling global challenges.

The grant will enable Earth-i to launch the ACCORD programme in Kenya and Rwanda. ACCORD has been specifically developed to help smallholder coffee farmers in Africa improve crop quality and yield. It combines Earth-i’s very high-resolution satellite imagery with WeatherSafe’s data platform, to provide extensive crop, weather and pest analysis, and share the information via a mobile app.

ACCORD will enable farmers to identify where more water, fertiliser or pesticides are needed to address unpredictable weather, pests, diseases, nutrient depletion or other factors which reduce coffee quality and quantity.

ACCORD evolved from work carried out by Earth-i and Weathersafe in Burundi. Together the two companies performed surveys of Burundi coffee farms using very high-resolution satellite data, conducted crop yield analysis and developed bespoke web applications to deliver the results of this analysis.

The ACCORD project was one of only ten programmes to receive funding as part of a joint initiative between the Government’s Industrial Strategy and the UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme, which uses UK space expertise to deliver innovative solutions to real world problems across the globe.

Richard Blain, CEO of Earth-i, said “Coffee is the second most traded commodity globally and vitally important to the economies of some of the poorest countries in the world. Agriculture is just one of a multitude of sectors where our imagery – and the insights drawn from those images – is improving lives on Earth.”

Science Minister Sam Gyimah said “The UK’s space sector is going from strength to strength. It pioneers new technology and provides jobs for 40,000. Today I can announce that the space sector’s capabilities are being put to use to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges.

“The UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme will help developing countries tackle big issues like disaster relief and disease control, while showcasing the services and technology on offer from our leading space businesses.”

Today’s news follows January’s successful launch of Earth-i’s VividX2 satellite, a service demonstrator for the Vivid-i Constellation, the world’s first full-colour, full-motion video satellite constellation.

The new commercial constellation will be the first of its kind to provide full-colour video; and the first European-owned constellation able to provide both video and still images.

Vivid-i will be a major leap forward for the Earth Observation industry significantly increasing the ability of companies and institutions to monitor, track and analyse activities, patterns of life and changes at any location on Earth. It will provide a number of innovative capabilities including:

The provision of high-frame rate images with resolutions better than one metre for any location on Earth.
The ability to film moving objects such as vehicles, vessels and aircraft in Ultra High Definition colour video.
Revisiting the same location multiple times per day with agile satellites that can be pointed to image specific areas of interest.
Rapid tasking of satellites to take images or video, and fast data download within minutes of acquisition.
Footage will be available for analysis within minutes of being captured and will improve decision-making and response times in a wide variety of scenarios from change detection to object identification, from disaster response to infrastructure monitoring.
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UNESCO developed a tool to monitor water quality using Earth Observation.

The International Initiative on Water Quality (IIWQ) World Water Quality Portal fosters understanding of the impacts of climate- and human-induced change on water security.

2 February 2018: The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has developed a tool to monitor water quality using Earth Observation. The tool – the International Initiative on Water Quality (IIWQ) World Water Quality Portal – fosters understanding of the impacts of climate- and human-induced change on water security. The Portal provides water quality information, facilitates science-based, informed decision-making for water management, and supports efforts by countries to implement the Sustainable Development Goal on clean water and sanitation (SDG 6). It also supports achievement of other SDGs and targets directly related to water quality and water pollution, such as Goals on health and life on land.

The tool, inter alia, enables users to visualize satellite-derived water quality information for the world’s lakes and rivers. It allows for interactive browsing of water quality products, allowing users to select water quality parameters and specific regions of interest, set desired virtual sampling stations, and gather values and time series information. The Portal was developed in the framework of UNESCO-International Hydrological Programme’s (IHP) IIWQ.

The IIWQ promotes scientific collaboration to address water quality issues through joint research activities, knowledge generation and dissemination, and sharing of solutions, technologies, policy approaches and best practices in developing and developed countries.
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REMAP app is an open-access online application for land cover classification and monitoring. The application is aiming to extend the ability of volunteers, managers, and scientists to assess the extent of land cover changes and implement actions to help the conservation of natural environments around the world under the IUCN Red list of ecosystems.

The app utilizes geospatial data and analysis capacity of the Google Earth Engine. REMAP allows users to collectively develop classifications of land cover within an area of interest anywhere in the world where there is enough archival Landsat data. The system also facilitates monitoring and analysis of land cover change by allowing users to map ecosystem distributions at two points in time (2003 and 2017), to quantify the area of each map class and to complement a variety of other applications that support the conservation of biodiversity.

Land cover data documents how much of a region is covered by forests, wetlands, native vegetation, agriculture, and other land and water types. The capacity to measure and report change and trend in land cover over time is critical, REMAP users can evaluate as well gain insight into natural dynamic barriers condition that can protect vulnerable communities against natural hazards such as floods, hurricanes, tsunami and avalanches.

REMAP is expected to help expand the use of classified maps in ecosystem monitoring and conservation programs. Users like volunteers, students and managers will be able to determine the extent of land cover and implement conservation projects or actions to reduce the loss of natural ecosystems.

It is expected to be further developed in the future through the addition of climate maxima and minina, new global image composites, relevant and available satellite imagery, and a functionality to produce maps in mobiles devices.
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NASA’s Earth-observing satellites can track the forces that create malaria outbreaks, and their data will soon help local communities make big strides toward warding off the deadly disease.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng

The Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS) project allows satellites from far above the Amazon rainforest in South America to track environmental factors (such as rainfall) and human activities (such as logging) that may attract the Anopheles darlingi mosquito, the host of malaria in the region.

NASA’s Applied Sciences Program is funding the investigation into using the LDAS to predict malaria outbreaks. William Pan of the Duke Global Health Institute, who is leading the project, said it could be ready to be implemented within a few years, and its analytical models can also be extended to help prevent the spread of Zika, dengue or other diseases. [Why Use Satellites To Measure Rain? (Video)]

By pinpointing areas with warm air temperatures that are likely to have calm ponds or puddles of water, the satellites provide data that Pan and his research team can use, in cooperation with the Peruvian government, to forecast malaria outbreaks down to the household level, NASA officials said in a statement.

Malaria is a deadly global disease that is transmitted by about 40 species of mosquitoes, according to NASA. And in nations like Peru, it is difficult to assess where contaminated female mosquitoes are laying their eggs. The insects look for warm and calm waters, which, according to NASA, can emerge in changing parts of the rainforest, depending on where rainfall accumulates and where logging ditches are dug.

The Amazon basin is witnessing a recent rise in malaria infections, which have particularly severe effects on young children and the elderly. According to the World Health Organization’s 2016 Malaria Report, Peru and Venezuela were each experiencing more than 20 percent spikes in estimated malaria cases as well as in estimated mortality rates. People do not always experience their first symptoms of malaria where they contract the disease, so containing an outbreak is challenging. Malaria is passed from female mosquitoes when they feed on blood, and frequently lay eggs as they have short life cycles of just two weeks.

Pan and his team can get data about precipitation, soil moisture, air temperature and vegetation from the LDAS, which folds in data from satellites such as Landsat, Global Precipitation Measurement, Terra and Aqua.

By showing where calm puddles and ponds are likely to form, the team can anticipate where malaria outbreaks are likeliest to occur.

“These models let us predict where the soil moisture is going to be in a condition that will allow for breeding sites to form,” Ben Zaitchik, the project’s co-investigator, said in the statement.

As NASA satellites detect rainfall, scientists can make predictions about where loggers are likeliest to enter the jungles — and, therefore, where they might catch malaria — since logs are easier to transport via timber floating, where there is a body of water they can travel upon. Malaria is often a byproduct of deforestation, and several nations in the Amazon basin, like Peru, are home to extensive, and sometimes illegal, logging. As the prediction models analyze the data from NASA’s satellites, public health officials can make better-informed preparations by sending aid to people living near malaria breeding grounds in the country.

The project is now in the third and final year of its NASA grant, and Pan’s team continues to refine the models. The Peruvian government is already familiarizing itself with LDAS, according to NASA, and the malaria prediction tools should be ready for use within the next few years. Colombia and Ecuador, which also have lands inside the Amazon basin, have expressed interest in the initiative.
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A flock of Doves takes detailed pictures of the whole Earth every day. You’ve probably seen their photos, or read a headline informed by the data they gather. What can the Army learn from these birds and the former NASA engineers who set them aloft?

As wildfires raged through half a dozen Northern California counties in October, a San Francisco company offered free access to its satellite photos of the devastation to the public, first responders, aid providers and media.

What made the company’s photos of the burning wine country worth studying was that they were taken daily from 230 to 310 miles above Earth. The company, Planet, operates the largest constellation of satellites ever—more than 190 at last count.

Planet’s story began in 2010, when three aerospace engineers left the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, to start an audacious business: a private satellite company.

The trio—American Robbie Schingler, Briton Will Marshall and Australian Chris Boshuizen—built their first prototype satellites in Schingler’s garage, basically taking apart a cellphone and adding a telescope, extra battery power and some other features. They moved their lab to San Francisco in 2011 and founded Planet Labs Inc., now known simply as Planet. (Boshuizen left the company in 2015.)

Their idea was revolutionary. Satellites typically weigh over 3 tons and are about the size of a bus, take a decade or more to design and build and, by the time they’re deployed, are running on obsolete computing systems for the 10 or so years they’re in use. What Planet does is turn all that on its head. Each of their satellites (called Doves, and launched in Flocks) is roughly the size of a large shoebox and is built using commercial off-the-shelf technology.

They’re constantly being upgraded with the latest available technology (the Dove is on its 14th iteration) for the roughly three years they’ll be in orbit. They take continuous daily photographs of Earth. The difference between their images and, say, Google Earth’s is that Planet’s images are updated daily, rather than every few months, and are compiled into a cloud-based database, allowing users to compare changes to areas both large and small over time.

The satellites, as Planet describes it, “act like a line scanner for the planet.” Custom automation software allows Planet’s Mission Control team to schedule imaging windows, push new software in-orbit and download images to 30 ground stations worldwide. The constellation of 190-plus satellites is akin to what the Army foresees as it pursues networked swarms.

But it’s once all those images get back to Earth that the real magic begins. Planet has developed analytical algorithms that produce an array of products for:

Agriculture—Planet’s continuous images of their fields allow farmers to understand changes in soil, crops, irrigation and disease, allowing them to farm more efficiently, profitably and sustainably.

Governments—Planet’s imagery lets local governments track urban growth, unpermitted building and changing land use, and allows them to better manage regional transportation budgets, land use policy, economic development plans, disaster response, crisis management and humanitarian aid, such as in the case of the Northern California fires and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

Intelligence and defense—Planet provides transparency into global events, constantly photographing broad swaths of Earth and targeted areas of interest. The images allow for monitoring of man-made and natural disasters; ports and shipping; and population shifts. Planet’s images after the recent North Korean nuclear test showed widespread landslides in the area surrounding the test site, suggesting to experts that the explosion was much larger than originally thought.

Forestry—Images allow for improved monitoring of forest health, tracking of illegal logging and planning of timber-harvesting operations.

Planet also offers products for mapping; energy and infrastructure; and finance and business intelligence.

Other companies, known as analytics-as-a-service companies, use their own algorithms to sort Planet’s data, and many of them, in turn, have partnered with Planet. A Jakarta-based analytics company, Dattabot, used satellite data from Planet to help secure loans for Indonesian farmers.

Planet is at the leading edge of an exploding wave of space privatization, its satellites having hitched rides on U.S., Indian, Russian and private rocket launches. Planet and other satellite startups, including UrtheCast Corp., DigitalGlobe Inc. and Orbital Insight, are making Earth-imaging resources once reserved for governments available to businesses and the public. Companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Orbital Sciences Corp. and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, are launching their own rockets into space.

Planet’s medium-resolution Dove satellites (in the aerospace industry, satellites are commonly called “birds”) got the name because they are “peace-bringing satellites, enabling commercial, humanitarian, and environmental applications at a scale that has never been attempted before,” according to the company website. As of October 2017, there were more than 175 of them circling the Earth. In a single launch in February, Planet sent 88 satellites aboard an Indian rocket into orbit. Another 48 were launched in July aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Also in Planet’s constellation are five medium-resolution RapidEye satellites, acquired when it bought BlackBridge in 2015; seven high-resolution SkySat satellites acquired when Google sold its Terra Bella subsidiary to Planet in Feb­ruary 2017 (as part of which, Google acquired an equity stake in Planet and entered into a multiyear agreement to purchase SkySat imaging data); and six SkySats launched in October.

Not that the private satellite business is without its risks. In October 2014, an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket, whose payload included 26 Doves bound for release from the International Space Station, exploded shortly after launch off the coast of Virginia. In June 2015, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket broke up during takeoff from Cape Canaveral in Florida; eight Doves were aboard.

While Planet is most definitely a business—according to a Bloomberg Business article from June 29, 2017, Planet has raised more than $180 million in venture capital and is valued at more than $1 ­billion—it sees its mission as making the world a better place by changing the way we understand, and ultimately manage, the Earth’s resources. “Whether you’re measuring agricultural yields, monitoring natural resources or aiding first responders after natural disasters,” says its website, “our data is here to lend businesses and humanitarian organizations a helping hand. Planet believes timely, global imagery will empower informed, deliberate and meaningful stewardship of our planet.”

Schingler, 38, Planet’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, spoke with Army AL&T on Oct. 11, 2017. He worked for 10 years at NASA, where he helped build the Small Spacecraft Office at NASA Ames and pursued new business opportunities for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a planned space telescope that’s part of NASA’s Explorers Program.

Schingler later served as NASA’s open government representative to the White House and as chief of staff for the Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA. He received an MBA from Georgetown University, an M.S. in space studies from the International Space University of Strasbourg, France, and a B.S. in engineering physics from Santa Clara University. He was a 2005 Presidential Management Fellow.

Army AL&T: Planet Labs can photograph nearly all of the Earth’s surface every day, which is something not even the U.S. government can do. To what purpose?

Schingler: The purpose for us is to do a global monitoring mission at this spatial resolution [how small an object you can see]. So that’s important. … Actually, just to correct you, the U.S. government is mapping the whole Earth every day with the MODIS satellite, which is 500 meters per pixel. One satellite. But what we do is image the whole world every day at 3 meters per pixel. And that spatial resolution allows for us to build a data set that lends itself to analytics. So when you apply the analytics technology to this data, you can come up with some really interesting insights.

We are a commercial-first company—we have a lot of customers in agriculture and in finance sectors, and they’re interested in making a better decision on either a trade or when to plant and cultivate. And [with] the spatial resolution and the temporal resolution [the precision of a measurement with respect to time] that we have, they’re able to measure economic stops and flows on the planet.

Now, it turns out from a government perspective … the same pixels and the same analytical capabilities can be used to modify our government’s workflow as well, on the civil side and on the military intelligence side. On the military intelligence side, the time-series nature of this—the term of art has been “activity-based intelligence,” or patterns of life. … When you can classify that change, that pattern of life, and identify a signature that then can become an early indication of something about to happen, then you can better allocate your scarce resources—either high-resolution capabilities, pixelated aircraft or human—in order to then anticipate what’s about to happen and, in some cases, mitigate something from happening.

Army AL&T: You guys made it big by going small, by building not only very small satellites but a lot of them. Is there a lesson for DOD and the Army about going small, and about using off-the-shelf technology?

Schingler: Absolutely. I believe that the future of space is to continue to have very, very high value, unique, one-of-a-kind assets—whether they’re flagship astrophysics missions or they’re used for national technical needs. When it comes to things that are a bit more operational, that have commercial utility, I think the Army and the government in general should be really adoptive, should embrace these newer technologies and allow for [the government] to then, on the space side of things, focus on the harder things, and focus further out. Something that gives them an offset.

Now, lessons specific for the Army, around using small satellites, is just: Get on with it. You know, this is actually a really, really good training capability for young [engineers]. Give them the ability to innovate within a box, you know, whether it’s size or whether it’s cost or whether it’s time, or all three, and see what they can do. By treating the satellite like a robot, which is what it is, rather than something up on a pedestal—that maybe you influence one appliance or one component within one subsystem within one mega-satellite over a decade—you have a different relationship with it as an engineer.

And so by iterating on that relatively quickly, you really understand the system dynamics of the hardware, which then allows you to think about the system dynamics of the entire system. It’s not just the sensors that you launch into space, but you think about the entire value chain. Ultimately, the reason why we’re going into space is to collect unique information—and, with that unique information, to allow for people to make better decisions. … We also go to space for other signals like PNT [positioning, navigation and timing], and for [communications], but largely for all the other applications, it’s really about getting unique information to make better decisions.

So the faster that we can speed that up, from asking a question to getting an answer … is really smart. There are places to innovate—not just on the hardware that goes into space but on the network of the ground stations. Then also the data exploitation platform that allows for an end user to ask a question and get an answer.

What’s very interesting about this trend of small satellites that would interest your readers in the Army, and the growing proliferation of unclassified and commercial imagery we see, is that users that want to use this … more tactically rather than strategically, can now get access to space. And so that’s one of the beauties of our constellation [of satellites’] capabilities. By remaining unclassified, it means that you don’t have to have four stars on your shoulder to get access to what was once an extremely strategic capability. It now can be done in more of a day-to-day operational modality.

Army AL&T: The satellites get all the attention, and rightly so. They’re very sexy. But what about the analysis of that data? The possibilities seem to be almost limitless. And in fact, you’re partnering with a number of companies that take your data and analyze it differently than you do. Talk about that.

Schingler: OK, that’s a great question. And I’m glad that you brought up a number of our partners and customers, because it’s absolutely key for this to really grow the market and allow for something, again, that was once strategic use for government to actually make its way into better decision-making tools in the economy. And that’s what we’re absolutely focused on doing, growing the number of users who can get access to this information.

Our industry, remote sensing, is a very special theme-strategic industry that was primarily driven by the intelligence community for decades. And we called it the tradecraft, being able to exploit … and promote remote-sensing information. You know, you had to have a master’s and a Ph.D. in order to understand what you were looking at. I think what has evolved over time is [that] the IT [information technology] companies of the world have really commoditized … cloud-based technology. And that begins to open-source a variety of computer-vision and machine-learning algorithms. And machine-learning algorithms need data. They need data in order to actually train those algorithms so that they become more accurate.

So at Planet, we see ourselves as collecting unique information and bringing that unique information with other spatially explicit information to analytics. When you add data plus analytics, that’s really what our product is, it’s a platform that has core machine-learning analytics baked into it.

We’re trying to decrease the barrier for our users to ask questions and get answers. In order to do that, we partner with a variety of companies that have access to our data and core analytics in order to allow for them to build a product that focuses on the customers’ needs.

You know, we have customers that are building applications specific for farmers or specific for a commodity trader or that is specific for an insurance provider or for a small holder in agriculture capability. We have hundreds of customers. Our customers operate in over 100 different countries and are really focused on actually building businesses, building a product that can scale and that will really solve the problem. So we see ourselves as more of a platform and an enabler that allows for people to come up with new products and services that were not possible before. Because we’re doing a lot of the hard-core remote sensing work to get all of that data co-registered, co-aligned, activated to the cloud, then also with the core machine-learning analytics that allow for our users and customers to build novel products and solutions. So that’s the reason why we partner with a lot of people that actually are building applications that are derived from Earth observation data.

Another program, I think, that’s really specific and useful for the Army and the government in general is that we are an unclassified and commercial company. And there are many workflows and use cases that we aren’t aware of that the government has and truly needs. So we have a partner program for system integrators and for companies that exist to help the government solve their problems. And they are able to take this new commercial tool and then customize elements of it so that they can modernize internal workflow within the U.S. government. That’s something that I think is just beginning. It takes quite a bit of time in order to modify a workflow. By blending in some automation, you can really increase the ROI [return on investment] of the people and the assets that are already deployed to solve government needs.

Army AL&T: I wonder if you could talk for a minute about failure. It seems like a certain amount of failure is built into your business plan. You’ve lost satellites when rockets exploded on the launch pad. Your satellites have a life span of about three years, but you’re constantly tinkering and upgrading and changing.

Schingler: We test, learn and iterate on our technology constantly, whether it’s a new sensor or a new technology in space, or whether it’s how we manufacture our satellites or how we build out our ground stations or build out our automated mission control and our data pipeline and our analytics. We abide by the popular principle of a highly aligned and loosely coupled organization. That allows for each of those nodes to be constantly upgraded over time. That then ends up increasing the value that comes out in the end for the user and for the customer. That’s how we actually develop the technology.

The way that we operate the technology is to be reliable, because what comes out in the end is we want to have a service-level agreement that we can live up to and that our customers can expect. And so those two things, being agile and being reliable, are two values that we have in the company. You can’t really have one without the other if you want to keep inventing new technology. But then you also want to anchor in that type [of] project in the world, in the market.

That same methodology fits all those in the company: We really wanted to be able to build satellites in a very different way and to iterate on the learnings of the technology and to pull into the satellite new chips and components when they just come out on the market. And knowing specifics in space, you can take those chips and components and actually build out a system that can then work well in space today.

We have a very, very robust, high-­performing satellite in a 5-kilogram package. Part of the reason we wanted to go small, too, is so the launch costs are less per satellite. If the launch costs are less per satellite, then the total cost of the system is less. If the total cost of the system is less, then if you lose one or two or three [satellites], that’s part of doing business. But if you lose one or two or three, then that means that you’ll take a bigger step with the new technology that you develop. And so by taking a bigger step, that means that you actually are bringing the future forward even faster. You can see how that’s a positive feedback for accepting risk, and reasonable risk.

That being said, you know, when we launched 88 satellites, that’s kind of putting a lot of eggs in one basket. And so, of course, we accepted that risk but we hedge it by buying insurance. There are ways that you make sure that these things aren’t catastrophic for the organization.

I think that’s the main thing, is you don’t ever want to have an existential thing that’s out of your control actually impact the viability of an organization. And so in space, we always want to launch more than we need so that we can basically degrade [as satellites go offline].

Army AL&T: Is there anywhere you would draw the line in terms of working with the government?

Schingler: Planet is a commercial organization. We see the federal market as the largest market in geospatial today. And so we definitely need to service that market by selling a commercial service to them. But that’s very different from going inside the government and being a systems integrator or being a contractor. Our reason for being is to bring global change to the enterprise and to bring geospatial into a workflow of business at the speed of business. That’s how we’ve chosen to focus, and it’s different from going inside to the government and being one custom solution for a very, very large, important problem. But the ecosystem is much larger than that. So we’re purposefully selling the same thing to the federal government that we would sell to an agriculture company or to a financial data services company.

Army AL&T: You worked for the government, for NASA.

Schingler: Yeah, for 10 years.

Army AL&T: What, if you were put in charge of NASA tomorrow, would you change?

Schingler: I would invest in small launch, number one. Number two is I would do procurement reform in order to allow for the government to be a good customer, rather than only seeing industry as being a contractor. And number three is I would have a portfolio of projects that allows for my creative engineers and younger engineers to prototype and integrate and invent new technologies for government-specific needs.

Army AL&T: Is there anything you would like to add?

Schingler: I actually want to highlight what this is going to mean for the Army mission. You guys have a global mission. And a lot of it is used to keep the peace. And many missions today are done with collaboration, with our allies. And one of the unique things that really comes out of this commercial space revolution, and coming up with these unclassified data sources, means that you could get data just as fast. The person in the field can get it and share it and collaborate with an allied partner at the same rate that the intelligence community gets it or that the strategic community gets it.

So this is a game changer. It allows for people to have fresh, unique information. It’s unclassified and shareable, so you can come up with interesting and custom workflows. And it means that it speeds up the decision-making process. So the people on the ground will have greater situational awareness and understand what’s about to happen probabilistically. So I really do encourage your leaders to take stock of the direction where this is going, because it really is going to, I think, change the day-to-day workflow of people in the field.

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By MR. Bold
MR. MICHAEL BOLD provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. He is a writer and editor for Network Runners Inc., with more than 30 years of editing experience at newspapers, including the McClatchy Washington Bureau, The Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He holds a B.J. in journalism from the University of Missouri.

A test in Yemen showed satellite data could foresee an outbreak four weeks before it exploded

Orbiting satellites can warn us of bad weather and help us navigate to that new taco joint. Scientists are also using data satellites to solve a worldwide problem: predicting cholera outbreaks.

Cholera infects millions of people each year, leading to thousands of deaths. Often communities do not realize an epidemic is underway until infected individuals swarm hospitals. Advanced warning for impending epidemics could help health workers prepare for the onslaught—stockpiling rehydration supplies, medicines and vaccines—which can save lives and quell the disease’s spread. Back in May 2017 a team of scientists used satellite information to assess whether an outbreak would occur in Yemen, and they ended up predicting an outburst that spread across the country in June.

TESTING THE WATERS

Cholera is a waterborne bacterial disease that causes intestinal distress and dehydration. The illness can progress rapidly, peaking within hours or days. An overwhelming majority of cases occur in developing countries, exasperated by poor sanitation, urban slums and refugee camps.
Cholera can spread two ways: endemically or epidemically. Coastal communities are hot spots for endemic episodes. Ocean-dwelling cholera flourish in dry and hot seasons, and can be carried ashore by high tides. Coastal towns and villages become infected, but in many locales the process happens regularly and residents are reasonably prepared for these waves of infection.

Epidemic contamination is much less predictable, and can take inland communities by surprise. “They are not prepared—they don’t have vaccines, they don’t have dehydration solutions,” says Antarpreet Jutla, a hydrologist and civil engineer at West Virginia University who led the Yemen study. Cholera can spread easily via water, and with a burst of warm temperatures, high precipitation and poor water infrastructure, an epidemic can blossom quickly.

DISEASE IN REAL TIME

Quickly collecting ground data about these kinds of events can be challenging, especially in chaotic locations. Yemen is a textbook case. “Yemen has massive civil unrest, people are moving around, [there is] political instability—there’s no way for us to get a single data point,” Jutla says. But satellites gave his team a way to assess the disease risk from the sky, and without being in the country.

At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in December, Jutla presented the group’s prediction model of cholera for Yemen. The team used a handful of satellites to monitor temperatures, water storage, precipitation and land around the country. By processing that information in algorithms they developed, the team predicted areas most at risk for an outbreak over the upcoming month.

Weeks later an epidemic occurred that closely resembled what the model had predicted. “It was something we did not expect,” Jutla says, because they had built the algorithms—and calibrated and validated them—on data from the Bengal Delta in southern Asia as well as parts of Africa. They were unable to go into war-torn Yemen directly, however. For those reasons, the team had not informed Yemen officials of the predicted June outbreak.

The successful prediction did give the team confidence that their model, built on a variety of data types, is on the right track. “One of the things I like,” says Michael Wimberly, an ecologist at South Dakota State University, is that they are not looking “only at correlation to rainfall.” Wimberly uses remote-sensing technologies to monitor diseases like West Nile virus, and was not involved in the study. He says the cholera model is well grounded in hydrology and epidemiology. “They have an understanding of different types of epidemics that occur in different seasons; it’s very sophisticated.”

HELPING THE SICK

With a fast-moving disease like cholera, advanced warnings matter, especially in remote places. They offer a major advantage, says study co-author Rita Colwell, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a former director of the National Science Foundation. Colwell has been studying global infectious diseases for decades, and says their model for cholera is highly predictive. “This is a mechanism that will help preparation with medical supplies and vaccinations.”

Wimberly agrees. “That’s the value of disease forecasting: to be able to anticipate the right place, a little bit ahead of time, so we can get those tools out there.”

The team is cautious about broadcasting disease forecasts, not wanting to create public panic. They are working with several international agencies on the best way to communicate future predictions. They are also developing a platform that uses hydrologic and societal conditions to determine the probability of cholera outbreaks globally—with a goal of providing warnings that offer four weeks of lead time.
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A new World Water Quality Portal (link is external), launched by UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme (IHP), provides information on freshwater quality at the global scale using remote sensing data. Water quality affects human health, as well as ecosystems, biodiversity, food production and economic growth. While improving water quality worldwide is essential to sustainable development, reliable data is scarce, especially in remote areas and developing countries where monitoring networks and capacity are lacking.

© IIWQ World Water Quality Portal, UNESCO / EOMAP
The IIWQ World Water Quality Portal (link is external) addresses an urgent need to enhance the knowledge base and access to information in order to better understand the impacts of climate- and human-induced change on water security. It will facilitate science-based, informed decision-making for water management and support Member States’ efforts in implementing the Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation (SDG 6), as well as several other Goals and Targets that are linked directly to water quality and water pollution.

The portal, which was developed in the framework of UNESCO-IHP’s International Initiative on Water Quality (IIWQ), provides data on five key indicators of the state of water quality: turbidity and sedimentation distribution, chlorophyll-a, Harmful Algal Blooms (HAB), organic absorption and surface temperature. These indicators also provide information on the impact of other sectors and land uses such as urban areas, fertilizer use in agriculture, climate change or dam and reservoir management. For example, tracking changes in turbidity (the degree to which light is backscattered by particles in the water) is useful when monitoring sediment plumes from dredging and dumping activities. Chlorophyll-a is a pigment found in phytoplankton cells, while the HAB indicator shows possible areas affected by harmful algae blooms formed by cyanobacteria containing phycocyanin. The Portal uses optical data from Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites, which are open access, and a computational system, developed by EOMAP, Germany.

In this demonstration phase, the IIWQ World Water Quality Portal provides time-series data for seven river basins and surface water resources in all regions of the world, monitoring these five indicators since January 2016. The demonstration basins and regions are: Lake Sevan in the Caucasus highlands (Armenia and Azerbaijan); the Itaipu Reservoir and Parana River Basin (Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay); the Mecklenburg Lake Plateau (Germany); the River Nile and Aswan Reservoir (Egypt and Sudan); the Mekong Delta (Vietnam); the Florida Lakes (USA); and the Zambezi River Basin (Zambia and Zimbabwe). It also includes training materials to facilitate capacity building and raise awareness of all stakeholders, including water professionals, policy-makers, and the public at large.

On the occasion of the launch of the Portal, an Experts Meeting on “Water Quality Monitoring using Earth Observation and Satellite-based Information” was organized on 22-23 January 2018 in order to explore the potential of Earth Observation in filling the global data gap on water quality. Among the institutions represented, the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), the Japan Aerospace exploration Agency (JAXA), and the European Space Agency (ESA), expressed their interest in collaborating with UNESCO-IHP’s IIWQ to further develop the Portal. The representatives of these organizations and several Member States highlighted the Portal’s role in promoting of the use of scientific data for policy-making and in raising awareness of the value of satellite data for water resources management and monitoring.

An exhibition entitled “Water Quality from the Space – Mesmerizing Images of Earth Observation” was also shown at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (22-26 January) to mark the launch of the Portal. It presents results of the demonstration phase and features a collection of Earth observation images, displaying the state of water quality in major rivers, lakes, reservoirs and coastal deltas around the world. It stresses the importance of maintaining healthy ecosystems and shows the full potential of Earth Observation for global water assessment.

The portal is a further addition to the set of tools provided by UNESCO to help Member States monitor and manage water resources sustainably and reach the Sustainable Development Goals. These include interactive databases such as the Water Information Network System, and regular assessment and monitoring publications such as the annual World Water Development Report, and reports to monitor progess on the indicators of SDG6, the first of which will be released in June 2018.
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The UK Space Agency will use satellite imagery and earth observation data to help countries in Asia tackle forest fires, dengue and illegal fishing, it was announced.

Through its International Partnership Programme, the agency works with governments all over the world to improve disaster response or infectious disease management, for example.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, the agency will use satellites to map dry peat conditions, as forest fires often occur over drained peatland areas. With data on water levels in the peatlands, authorities can make decisions to mitigate the risk of fires.

Another project under the partnership will monitor dengue outbreaks in Vietnam. It will be possible to predict the likelihood of future dengue epidemics by linking earth observation data with climate forecasting and land surface data. The project will also be able to provide dengue forecasts under various climate change scenarios.

A third project will use satellite data to understand the location, time and behaviour of specific vessels at sea in the Philippines, in an effort to tackle illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

The agency has set aside a total of £11 million (US$15.3 million) for these three projects in particular. It will be funding ten projects altogether, totalling £38 million (US$ 52.9 million). They include an initiative in Colombia to monitor illegal gold mining; a project to help herders in Mongolia to build resilience against extreme weather; and an effort to monitor dam failures in Peru.

“The UK Space Agency’s International Partnership Programme will help developing countries tackle big issues like disaster relief and disease control, while showcasing the services and technology on offer from our leading space businesses,” UK Minister for Universities, Science, Research & Innovation Sam Gyimah said in a statement.

One existing project under the programme has helped to reduce the impact of natural disasters in the Philippines. A public-private partnership between the Philippines government and a satellite communications provider was called into action in December and January, when tropical storms killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of thousands more to evacuation centres.