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Australia’s top science organisation, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation or CSIRO, is to conduct joint research with US-based Radiant.Earth into satellite imagery and earth observation data for promoting disaster resilience and tackling critical issues in health, climate change and sustainable water management, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region.

A recent United Nations Environment Assembly or UNEA report says 41% of all disasters caused by natural hazards over the past two decades have occurred in the Asia-Pacific region.

Scientists say the partnership between Data61, Australia’s leading data innovation group, and Radiant.Earth, an ‘earth imagery platform for impact’, will mean their existing resources, networks and facilities can be used in real-time modelling, machine learning and visualisation technologies. The aim is to give the global community more timely and better evidence-based understanding of global activity and the changes needed to address critical challenges.

Adrian Turner, CSIRO’s Data61 chief executive, said the partnership with Radiant.Earth was an example of how science and technology and cross-border partnerships could deliver benefit to the global community.

Anne Hale Miglarese, Radiant.Earth’s chief executive, said: “The world is awash in Earth observation data, but most of the low- and middle-income countries are still poorly mapped and served by geospatial technologies.

“Partnering with Data61 to drive open remote sensing science will help us serve this community better, including non-profits working in global development, as well as national and regional government entities.”

Data61 was officially formed in 2016 with a mission ‘to create Australia’s data-driven future’. Radiant.Earth was launched in August last year to provide open access to geospatial data, with analytical tools ‘for global development practitioners designed to improve decision-making, and to foster entrepreneurship worldwide’. It aims to be able to ‘illuminate the earth’, allowing everywhere to be ‘seen’.

The UNEA report, Rapidly Growing Middle Class Presents Challenges and Opportunities for the Environment and Health in Asia and the Pacific, says increasing unsustainable consumption patterns have led to worsening air pollution, water scarcity and waste generation and threaten human and environmental health.

“Increased demand for fossil fuels and natural resources – extensive agriculture, palm oil and rubber plantations, aquaculture and the illegal trade in wildlife – are causing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. “The situation is exacerbated by adverse climate change effects and an increasing number of natural disasters, which are causing devastating human and financial losses in the region. Extreme climate events are projected to become the new normal.”

Informing decision-making

Miglarese said one planned activity will include hosting open data on Radiant.Earth’s platform and a demonstration of Data61’s mapping products and tools on that platform to “support mission critical programmes, primarily in the Asia-Pacific region”.

She said Radiant.Earth’s mission was to connect people worldwide to Earth imagery, geospatial data, tools and knowledge to meet the world’s most critical challenges.

Turner said Data61 has “world-leading expertise in applying data visualisation and geospatial tools to inform decision-making around smart cities and infrastructure, including mapping renewable energy systems or demographics in different locations to inform policy decision-making”.
“In addition, with our other technologies we can predict the behaviour and spread of bushfires and have worked with local emergency services organisations and government in Australia to plan for emergencies,” he said.

A combination of approaches, including Radiant.Earth’s extensive network, would be used to improve disaster resilience among disadvantaged communities in the Asia-Pacific region in the coming months, Turner said.

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(by Tereza Pultarova — September 15, 2017). PARIS — Earth-observation startups are investing in data analytics and machine learning to transform raw satellite data into marketable insights they say have the potential to be every bit as indispensable to investors and business leaders as the up-to-the-second analytics they get from the likes of a $20,000-a-year Bloomberg terminal subscription.

Speaking during the closing day of Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week here Sept. 15, top executives of Earth-observation startups Urthecast, Planet and others agreed that the growth of their respective businesses will depend on the ability to use the wealth of raw data acquired by their satellites to extract answers needed by customers across a wide range of industries.

“We believe that there is going to be a unique moment when this industry is going to be similar to what happened, for example, in navigation,” said Wade Larson, president and CEO of Vancouver-based Urthecast. “Navigation became kind of embedded infrastructure in a much larger industry called location-based services. We think that this is happening with geoanalytics, as well.”

Andrew Wild, chief revenue officer at San Francisco-based Planet, said the company is responding to the trend by focusing on customer engagement to understand how they could use their technology to solve practical problems in the new “insights economy.”

“We have a very good capability with satellites but that doesn’t matter if we are not solving business outcomes,” Wild said. “We have transformed our entire company outside in and we are talking with customers. We have deep conversations with all sorts of customers on all sorts of verticals.”

Jason Andrews, founder and CEO of BlackSky, part of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries, Inc., said the Earth-observation sector is moving from “mapping towards real-time monitoring.”

The company, which today announced a partnership with Thales Alenia Space to build a constellation of 60 high-resolution satellites with an hourly revisit time, sees its major business in an AI-driven platform combining data from its own satellites with data from competitors’ satellites to provide near-real-time information about any area of the world.

“No one wants to stare at the screen and monitor picture after picture,” said Andrews. “It’s about going from buying data to buying answers. We need to be able to engage with customers who don’t know anything about geospatial data and build products that people want to use.”

Andrews said BlackSky’s platform uses artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze information available on social media as well as global news feeds to determine areas of interest and provide imagery in real time as situations such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks unfold.

In addition to cloud-based data analytics platforms, Bobby Machinski, founder and CEO of San Jose, California-based satellite information and analytics company Hera Systems, said the future would favor processing data directly onboard satellites.

“It’s about getting answers as quickly as possible,” Machinski said.

The panelists also agreed the future would probably favor vertical integration of satellite companies with data processing and analytics firms as the majority of the revenues is to be made from selling insights to customers across sectors including oil and gas, financial markets, insurance and defense.

“We are building satellites because we need the data,” said Payam Banazadeh, CEO of Silicon Valley-based Capella Space, which is planning to launch six months from now what they describe as the first U.S. commercial SAR satellite constellation. “It’s not about the satellite, it’s about the software.”

Emiliano Kargieman, CEO of Brazil’s Satellogic said: “In my mind, vertical integration will win. It has many advantages to do the data acquisition and data analytics. Why would you let the pie go into the hands of the people who do the analytics?”

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The Swedish Armed Forces has awarded Spacemetric an extension to a current contract for maintenance and support of software systems managing reconnaissance imagery from the JAS 39 Gripen multirole fighter, and video data from UAVs deployed on international missions. Both solutions build on Spacemetric’s Keystone Image Data Management System.

“We’re very happy to see this evidence of the trust the Armed Forces puts in Spacemetric’s products and services”, says Bob Moll, Spacemetric’s Sales Manager. “Our solutions for the Swedish Armed Forces are rapid, efficient, and battle-proven. One third of the Tactical Air Reconnaissance missions in the 2011 operations over Libya were carried out by the Swedish Gripen aircraft supported by Keystone”, says Bob. “It’s no surprise that Keystone solutions are also attractive to other nations.”

For more information, please contact:
Dag Åsvärn, Key Account Manager, dag@spacemetric.com
spacemetric.com

The production of Airbus’ four new very high resolution satellites, which together will form the Pleiades Neo constellation, is well on schedule for launch in 2020.

They will join the already world leading Airbus constellation of optical and radar satellites and will offer enhanced performance and the highest reactivity in the market thanks to their direct access to the data relay communication system, known as the SpaceDataHighway.

This first batch of four optical and very agile satellites will double the number of visits per day anywhere on Earth and offer a re-tasking rate which is five times higher than previous constellations. Each satellite will be adding half a million km2 per day at 30cm resolution to Airbus’ offering.

These images will be streamed into the OneAtlas on-line platform, allowing customers to have immediate data access, analytics and correlation with Airbus’ unique archive of optical and radar data.

“With Pleiades Neo, we will have the most advanced high-resolution constellation on offer for both commercial and secured governmental applications with another four satellites added to our existing Airbus fleet of 10 accessible Earth observation satellites,” said Evert Dudok, Head of Communications, Intelligence and Security at Airbus Defence and Space.

“The fact that Pleiades Neo is equipped with the latest Laser Communication Technology gives our customers an advantage of speed that will be unrivalled in our industry for a long time.”

Pleiades Neo will utilise the SpaceDataHighway to ensure the highest system reactivity, lowest latency and high volume data transfer. Thanks to the very high communication bandwidth possible with lasers of up to 1.8 Gbit/s and the geostationary orbit positioning of the relay satellites, up to 40 terabytes per day can be transmitted securely in quasi-real-time to Earth, as opposed to the delay of several hours sometimes experienced today.

The four satellites will be equipped with reactive Ka-band terminals that will allow last minute tasking updates, even if the satellites are beyond their ground stations’ line-of-sight. This is an important asset for customers, when it comes to the assessment of natural disasters and first line response for civil and military applications.

The integrated next generation laser terminals are optimised in terms of power and will save 60% in mass and size compared to currently used terminals. They are designed by Tesat Spacecom and developed under a partnership between the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and Airbus.

These generational advancements have the added advantage of driving significant cost efficiencies in design and integration. Development and verification are supported by the DLR’s Space Administration with funds from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

The SpaceDataHighway, also known as the European Data Relay System (EDRS), was developed through a public-private partnership (PPP) between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Airbus, and actually benefits to the Sentinel satellites of the European Union’s Copernicus programme. Pleiades Neo will be the first commercial constellation to be equipped with this technology, and therefore able to provide a unique responsiveness level.

Thanks to Pleiades Neo, customers will take advantage from increased monitoring capability and operational efficiency. In line with Airbus’ strategy for increased digitalisation and connectivity, its next-generation ground segments will foster access to the information, offering machine learning and automated analytics applications. They will also provide multi-mission capabilities and large-scale image processing.

Entirely funded, manufactured, owned and operated by Airbus, Pleiades Neo is a breakthrough in Earth observation domain and will provide customers with high-level service continuity for the next 15 years.

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In a meeting organised with representatives of the Pôle Mer Bretagne Atlantique, Nicolas Hulot, French Minister of Ecology, set blue economy targets in a key phrase: “We must accelerate”.


This event dedicated to blue growth, which took place in France on July 21, 2017, enabled the minister to meet representatives of French civil society, military, and companies working on marine related issues and innovative projects approved by the Pôle Mer label.

The blue economy and the challenge of climate change are of prime importance. By 2015, the French maritime sector represented 310,000 jobs and 60 billion euros in turnover. From deep sea exploration to marine renewable energies, maritime transport and services, ports and research, oceans are a sustainable source for the development of blue growth: technological innovation, renewable energies, sustainable management of marine resources, etc.

Fighting illegal traffic at sea through satellite imagery

Four companies presented their activities to the minister, including CLS with the ALMACEN project, which detects illegal activities. The ALMACEN project aims to develop a new service to combat environmental crime and in particular illicit trafficking involving the maritime sector. This project relies on the exploitation of maritime big data mainly from satellite sources to characterize the behavior of ships.

18 September 2017. CLS, the French satellite services provider, has announced the acquisition of SIRS (Systèmes d’Information à Référence Spatiale [Information systems for space-related purposes), a French company founded in 1989, specialising in the production of geographical data from optical or aerial satellite images.

CLS is a subsidiary of CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), Ardian (the independent private investment company) and IFREMER (Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer).

Thanks to this acquisition, CLS – which already specialises in environmental monitoring – has further broadened its service offer and is now able to provide customers with enhanced solutions in the field of continental monitoring. Through its 25 offices and subsidiaries, CLS will consolidate its offer in Europe and develop its activity around the world with new services such as support for agriculture, regional planning, sustainable forest management, water resource management, and emergency mapping (in the event of flooding, forest fires, volcanic eruptions, etc.). With the acquisition of SIRS , CLS consolidates its position as an international provider of satellite services for the protection of the environment.

A strategic partnership

Christophe Vassal, Chairman of the CLS Management Board: “The future services will benefit from the synergy between CLS and SIRS and we expect them to be a great success. We have extremely complementary products, solutions and services. CLS already provides its customers with 30 years of experience in the field of environmental monitoring. SIRS complements CLS’s offer of oceanographic services with continental solutions and with its expertise in the field of optical satellite data.”

Jean-Paul Gachelin, Chairman and founder of SIRS: “This merger is a great opportunity for SIRS. Joining the CLS Group should boost our growth. CLS will help us develop our services abroad through its network of 25 offices and subsidiaries around the world. All the SIRS employees are pleased to be joining CLS. The Group shares our values and we have the same goal, which is to improve our understanding and management of the environment in order to make Earth a sustainable planet.”

The CLS Group had a turnover of nearly €115 million in 2016 and forecasts revenues of more than €125 million in 2017. In recent years, the group has experienced strong growth and set ambitious targets thanks to new markets.

Download the press release

24 July 2017. Sinergise has become a reseller of Airbus Defence and Space satellite imagery – Pléiades, which will be soon integrated into Sentinel Hub.

Pléiades Satellite Image – Andasol Solar Power Station, Spain © CNES 2014, distribution Airbus DS

Sinergise partnered with Airbus Defence and Space to provide Pléiades imagery, which will be available for purchase and distributed through Sentinel Hub services. We’ve already started with integrating new datasets into Sentinel Hub and we will keep you posted on the up-dates.

Pléiades satellite imagery is provided by two twin satellites, Pléiades 1A and Pléiades 1B, which are operating as a constellation in the same orbit. They are delivering very-high resolution optical data products and offering a daily revisit capability for the whole globe.

The Pleiades constellation is designed to obtain data in double-quick time. Its capability to acquire imagery in less than 24 hours presents a perfect source for usage in response to a crisis or natural disaster. You can use Pléiades products for regular monitoring, precision mapping and photointerpretation. By using the Airbus’ satellite tasking service the image acquisition time becomes faster and to access the new images takes less time (just a few hours in certain cases).

Pléiades 50-cm-resolution products are available at three processing levels, Primary, Projected and Ortho, in all spectral combinations. Continue reading for more information on spectral combinations and spectral bands.

Morocco will launch next November 8th its first Pleiade satellite from the European space port of Kourou in French Guiana, according to some Moroccan web sites.

Built by Airbus defense & Space Company, this Moroccan satellite will be launched with an Italian Vega rocket.

Designed as a dual civil/military system, Pleiades deliver very-high-resolution optical data products in record time and offer a daily revisit capability to any point on the globe.
They are able to obtain data in double-quick time. These types of satellites operate as a constellation in the same orbit, phased 180° apart.

Pleiades can also provide imagery anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours in response to a crisis or natural disaster. These satellites offer a wide coverage, fine detail, intensive monitoring, extensive archives and 50 cm resolution imagery.

This satellite system was born under the French-Italian ORFEO program (Optical & Radar Federated Earth Observation) between 2001 and 2003.

Equipped with innovative latest-generation space technologies like fiber-optic gyros and control moment gyros, Pleiades-HR 1A and 1B offer exceptional roll, pitch and yaw (slew) agility, enabling the system to maximize the number of acquisitions above a given area.

This agility coupled with particularly dynamic image acquisition programing make the Pleiades system very responsive to specific user requirements.

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Imagine a field, where 10000 variaties are growing in tighly, regularly spaced plots. Welcome to the daily live of plant breeders. Plant breeders observe, record and analyze key features in these fields every day to produce the selection of next generation of varieties.

Until recently, plant breeders would visit their experimental fields with pen and paper in order to acquire the necessary information. No need to explain it’s is a huge challenge to exclude human errors and obtain all information in a consistent and objective manner.
Let me explain to you how mapEO can add objectiveness and automation to these measurement campaigns by retrieving various kind or information through drone imagery.

IT’S ALL ABOUT INTEGRATING IMAGE ANALYTICS INTO DAILY DECISION MAKING

Drone uptake for regular monitoring in agriculture is limited, because drone flight endurance is short (10-20 minutes). But these short flights are just perfect for plant breeding plots. The images that are collected are so detailed that they can be used to generate current metrics automatically. On top of that, these measurements provide unbiased and consistent information throughout the growing season

In the field of plant breeding, the drone nor the camera are the most important aspect. It’s all about the image analytics, how they relate to existing agrometrics and how well this new source of information can be integrated into your daily decision making.

MAPEO, A DRONE IMAGE PROCESSING TOOL

We’ve been collaborating intensively with plant breeders from all over the world to develop mapEO, a drone image processing service dedicated for experimental fields.
Thanks to mapEO, you can obtain agrometrics which reaches field based measurements about:

• Plant height
• Disease detection
• Plant emergence
• Bio mass
• Plant cover
• …
Want to know more about mapEO and what it can do for you? Feel free to contact VITO they’ll help to get you started.

KEEPING THE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF DATA USEABLE

Although field sizes are rather limited, the resulting data is not. Counting emerging spinach plants for example requires a milimeter pixel resolution, which for a complete field can end up to 10 GB of data.
In order to process, access and use all this data correct and easy, you require specific infrastructure.

mapEO helps you as a plant breeders fully adopt and integrate drone technology and image processing techniques into your daily live.

You are able to:
• derive agrometric statistics over a vegetation cycle
• analyse synergies with experiments all over the world
• derive standards which make current drone flights still valuable in 5 years time

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When you look at a satellite image, although you may not see it, every pixel in the image is subtly contaminated by the atmosphere.

If you want to derive quantitative information or study evolutions through a series of satellite images, it is essential that the atmospheric disturbance is removed and the object surface reflectance is retrieved before any other analysis is made. iCOR does just that, and it is based on years of experience in the field at VITO Remote Sensing.

AVAILABLE TO THE BROAD USER COMMUNITY

The atmospheric correction software, iCOR (previously known as OPERA), is now available to the broad user community through the ESA Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) for the atmospheric correction of Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 data.

By implementing iCOR in SNAP, researchers can test iCOR for their own study areas and experiment with the different functionalities the new tool has to offer. The iCOR SNAP plug-in can be freely downloaded.

iCOR has been extensively validated in different research projects (HIGHROC, INFORM and SPONGE) and within the ESA-NASA ACIX, Atmospheric Correction Inter-comparison Exercise (https://earth.esa.int/web/sppa/meetings-workshops/acix).
It is important to keep improving our work on the atmospheric correction and expanding iCORs functionalities. Feedback from users is hereby invaluable so we encourage all iCOR user to send feedback, comments, suggestions, wishes, etc.

ICOR, SCENE GENERIC TOOL READY TO APPLY DEDICATED CORRECTION

The strength of iCOR is that it is scene generic: it works just as well on land as on water targets (coastal, transitional and inland waters). The tool identifies whether a pixel is water or land and applies a dedicated correction. iCOR runs without user interaction and all the input parameters can be retrieved from the image itself.

The extra module, SIMEC is part of iCOR and the SNAP implementation allows you to switch it on and off. In particular inland waters and estuaries can be severely affected by these effects and correction is strongly recommended. The iCOR implementation in SNAP corrects Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 satellite imagery, and is easily configurable through the SNAP user interface. It works on Linux and Windows platforms alike.

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

The development of iCOR started many years ago and was originally used to correct airborne hyperspectral imagery for atmospheric effects. We soon added an extra module, SIMEC (Similarity Environment Correction), because we experienced severe contamination of the water pixels by light coming from the surrounding land and vegetation.

We extended the first features so that it would be possible to correct satellite imagery as well and made the tool fully operational without any need for user interaction. iCOR was tested and validated extensively for MERIS, Landsat-8, Sentinel-2 and PROBA-V. We use iCOR ourselves in several operational processing chains.

LET’S GET YOU STARTED

The iCOR SNAP plug-in can be freely downloaded. After download and installation you can open it as a plugin in SNAP. The manual describes in detail the installation and handling of iCOR.
iCOR was developed through funding from the Belgian Science Policy, The European Space Agency and the European Commission.

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