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June 6, 2017. SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Harris Corp. and Canada’s exactEarth are establishing a space-based constellation of more than 60 maritime-tracking sensors to enable government and commercial customers to pinpoint the location of ships around the world nearly instantaneously.

Harris announced on June 5 at the GEOINT Symposium that the first four sensors, launched in January as hosted payloads on Iridium Next communications satellites, are tracking 250,000 ships through their Automatic Identification System (AIS) beacons. By the end of 2018, when Iridium Communications is scheduled to finish launching its Iridium Next constellation, Harris and exactEarth will be able to notify customers of a ship’s location with an average latency of less than one minute.

That means it will usually take less than one minute from the time a satellite detects an AIS message for the data to pass through the Iridium constellation and ground stations to the customer, David Mottarella, Harris senior manager for maritime geospatial solutions, told reporters June 5.

AIS signals were designed for ship-to-ship communications and the cannot always be detected by satellites. To prevent gaps in coverage, 82 percent of the world will be within view of two AIS sensors and 48 percent will be within view of three. “The more chances I have to collect the data, the better our detection probabilities are going to be,” Mottarella said. “With 60-plus satellites on orbit, that detection capability is going to be unmatched.”

Harris owns and operates the AIS payloads on Iridium Next satellites and provides AIS products and services to U.S. government customers. exactEArth handles ground-based processing of AIS data and sells AIS products and services to other global customers.

Prior to the January launch of hosted payloads on Iridium Next, exactEarth was tracking ships with AIS sensors on eight small satellites in low Earth orbit.

When the exactEarthRT, which stands for real time, constellation is completed, Harris and exactEarth will be able to notify customers of specific events, such as ship-to-ship rendezvous, ships changing direction, turning off AIS beacons or loitering in prohibited areas. With the new space-based constellation, Harris and exactEarth also will be able to validate a ship’s position even if the vessel is attempting to spoof its geolocation, Mottarella said.

This article was written by Written by Debra Werner in SpaceNews. Source

Harwell, Oxfordshire, 29th June, 2017. Rezatec, in conjunction with the University of Reading, is delivering its PASQUAL (“Monitoring and prediction of PASture QUALity and productivity from satellites”) project to develop an Earth Observation satellite based pasture farming intelligence tool.

Through the analysis of multiple remote sensing satellite data sources (visible and radar) and meteorological data, in combination with the University of Reading’s detailed modelling and data-assimilation techniques, the tool will enable dairy farmers to monitor and predict pasture productivity and quality.

Trials are currently being conducted by the University of Reading over a two-year period, initially at controlled research plots, and are now being extended to operational dairy farms. This approach is driving iterative development of models and data products, which will be delivered to users through Rezatec’s geospatial web-portal platform. The platform will be upgraded and extended to support the required data streams and implement the bespoke grass growth models to create an innovative decision support tool for dairy farmers.

Alternative technologies and R&D strategies in this area are scarce, but those that are emerging generally focus on empirical vegetation indices, which can lead to unreliable and inaccurate estimates of PPQ; our proposed approach aims to offer a much more reliable product. Furthermore, most competitors using vegetation indices are focusing on crops, rather than grasslands, despite the fact that dairy production world-wide is 700 million tonnes.

“The proposed work and selected approach will ensure an accelerated route to market of the research currently being conducted by those at the forefront of remote sensing and pasture research, including colleagues at the University’s Centre for Dairy Research (CEDAR), in strong collaboration with practitioners in the dairy farm industry,” commented Professor Anne Verhoef, Principal Investigator of PASQUAL, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, the University of Reading.

This project is innovative both commercially and technically on many fronts. It pushes boundaries beyond current leading-edge world science and technology in the area of obtaining near real time estimates of grass crop productivity and quality. The University of Reading will develop a new model for predicting the productivity and quality of grasslands. This model will be informed by a broad range of data for both model development, calibration and verification. In addition to established local data (farm management/field data, weather data), the model will have direct access to multiple remote sensing satellite data sources including radar data which is well suited to monitoring tasks in cloud covered regions, such as the UK.

Dr Andrew Carrel, Chief Technology Officer, Rezatec added, “The outputs from the data modelling process will be combined with other data on Rezatec’s platform, where further processing will take place using machine learning and data mining techniques to add the predictive analysis that will make the tool highly valuable for the farming end users.”

Rezatec’s platform is designed to deliver high performance data visualization, analytics and decision support to multiple end users, and is highly scalable. It will facilitate the broad use of the farming intelligence tools and services within the UK, Europe and across the globe.

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Epsom, June 2017. Astun Technology, providers of cloud-based open-source GIS solutions has been accepted as a G-Cloud 9 supplier.

The G-Cloud is a framework agreement for use by UK Public Sector bodies which allows them to choose and purchase cloud computing services covering infrastructure, platform, software and specialist cloud services. The framework is for commodity based, pay-as-you go cloud services in three specific areas; cloud hosting, cloud software and cloud support.

Astun Technology was formed in 2005 to provide open source and web-based GIS services to local and central governments. Today, as all organisations realise the technical and financial benefits of using cloud solutions to create, manage and deliver their crucial geo-services, the demand for Astun’s knowledge and experience in delivering marketing leading, fully managed AWS-based GIS cloud solutions, continues to grow.

Mike Smith, Head of Sales for Astun commented on how joining the G-Cloud 9 will benefit his company’s customers; “The G-Cloud frameworks have proved very popular with our customers as they have helped them to simplify their procurement process whilst ensuring that they receive excellent value for money. G-Cloud 9 is particularly important as it will supercede all previous G-Cloud Frameworks.”

To search the G-Cloud 9 Framework visit https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud and to see Astun on the G-Cloud 9 visit https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/search?q=astun

15 June 2017 – by Benedict O’Donnell
World-leading research institutes have agreed to join forces with funding agencies and policymakers to create the European Open Science Cloud, the largest shared data repository in history.

The idea is to give every scientific user access to the data resulting from research carried out with public funding, using a single login.

According to Professor Iain Mattaj, head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, the cloud-based service could facilitate the sort of interdisciplinary collaboration that has transformed our present understanding of the earth’s climate and the human genome.

By 2020, it could grant the science community direct and easy access to scientific data generated by publicly funded research, and used for scientific publication.

Broad agreement on the go-ahead came during the European Open Science Cloud Summit in Brussels, Belgium, on 12 June. Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, described the European Open Science Cloud as a one-stop shop for scientists to pool their observations, and as a commons for European science. ‘I see it as a new Republic of Letters,’ he said, referring to the correspondence between intellectuals during the Age of Enlightenment.

The platform could save time on unnecessary duplication of experiments and grant even small research groups access to vast data samples.

This unprecedented pooling of research data from across scientific disciplines and national borders takes to a new level the open research data repositories that have supported scientific collaboration since the early days of the internet.

No one is underestimating the scale of the challenges to be faced in making the European Open Science Cloud work.

‘We are talking about a staggering amount of data,’ said Dr Harald Reichert from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. His institute alone records petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of measurements each month – enough to drown even Facebook’s servers over just a couple of years. Making this volume of research data accessible to 1.7 million researchers across Europe requires vast amounts of bandwidth, funding and work, he said.

Professor John Womersley from the European Spallation Source super microscope in Lund, Sweden, insisted that storing data is not enough. The success of the European Open Science Cloud will hinge on how easy it is to access and use.

‘The internet would be useless if it was just data,’ said Prof. Womersley. ‘Researchers also need tools like browsers, search engines and apps that find the data that they are looking for and turn it into something that they can use.’

Decades

This raises unprecedented data management questions, said Professor Eckhard Elsen from the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland. ‘In research fields like climatology, data need to be averaged over decades before they can be used,’ he said. ‘A private company can go bankrupt over those periods.’

To avert the risk of the science cloud becoming a research data graveyard, these tools have to meet the needs of research communities across different sciences, with each dataset annotated and formatted in a way that one single system can make sense of.

According to Dr Reichert, annotating the details of each dataset would be too time-consuming for scientists to do themselves – all the more so in cross-disciplinary research, where the requirements of peers are not necessarily known.

Research data ‘stewards’ would be needed, in addition to strong incentives and skills for all scientists to be able to share research data, in order to ensure the quality of the data.

Volunteers are now formalising their commitments in a joint declaration, and aim to share tasks in a structured, open strategy, with the agreement of EU Member States.

The national science funds of the Netherlands and Switzerland have agreed to provide advice on making the data released by new research projects internationally accessible, and other participants have offered their experience in data exchange platforms spanning borders and specialisations.

Commissioner Moedas announced that the EU itself would invest over EUR 200 million over the next two years into coordinating on-going efforts.

‘We want to put our money where our mouth is and get the European Open Science Cloud running by 2020,’ said Commissioner Moedas. ‘Science has outgrown the constraints of technology once again. It needs this internet of research data to continue.’

Next steps

The idea is for the open science cloud summit to result in a formal declaration, which will be agreed upon by all stakeholders. There will be a plan on how to achieve the European Open Science Cloud by the end of this year, according to the European Commission. This will include a strategy for governance and funding.
A dedicated governance board will also handle the implementation of the open science cloud by 2020.

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28 June 2017. At its 87th session, the EUMETSAT Council approved the extension of Jason-2 operations and contracts required to deploy the EPS Second Generation (EPS-SG) system in the early 2020’s and improve access to EUMETSAT and Copernicus data.

The Jason-2 high-precision ocean altimetry mission launched in 2008 and exploited in partnership with NOAA, NASA and CNES was extended for two years, from 1 January 2018 until the end of 2019, to complement Jason-3 , operational since July 2016.

The Council also welcomed Ireland as the 16th Participating State in the Jason-CS Programme, the contribution of EUMETSAT to the cooperative Sentinel-6 mission expected to replace Jason-3 in 2021. The mission involves also ESA, the European Union and the United States through NASA and NOAA.

A key milestone towards the initial deployment of the EUMETSAT Polar System of Second Generation (EPS-SG ) was passed with the award of contracts to Arianespace and Telespazio for the launch services and the Launch and Early Operations (LEOP) services for the first pair of Metop-SG satellites plus one spare satellite.

The first two Metop-SG satellites will be launched from Kourou by Soyuz, and the contract with Arianespace also offers EUMETSAT the possibility to use Ariane-62 for the third satellite.

To improve access to EUMETSAT and Copernicus data, the Council approved a contract to extend the EUMETCast-Africa data broadcasting service with higher bandwidth and arrangements with ECMWF and Mercator-Ocean for the deployment of a distributed Copernicus Data and Information Access Service (DIAS) platform on behalf of the European Union.

June 27, 2017. Air and Space Evidence, the world’s first Space Detective Agency, is launching a new service using ‘spy in the sky’ satellite technologies to detect waste crime.

The new service called Waste from Space is based on development of a semi-automated detection model utilizing satellite data (and machine learning algorithms), enabling the company to offer an effective and commercially viable geospatial intelligence tool that can detect serious waste crime.

Waste crime is increasingly causing significant damage to society and is estimated to cost the UK more than a billion pounds a year. It is estimated to cost all EU countries €72 – 90 billion per annum.

Ray Purdy, Director, Air and Space Evidence says, “Waste crime is highly lucrative – and can also be hard to detect. Governments need new investigatory approaches because at the moment they are several steps behind waste crime gangs. We will offer a much needed, innovative intelligence gathering and analysis service to governments, whereby we can identify waste crime that Governments are not aware of, bringing immense value to their work and enabling them to catch more waste crime gangs in the act.”

In 2016, the head of the Environment Agency in England called waste crime the “new narcotics”, commenting that “it feels to me like drugs felt in the 1980s: the system hadn’t quite woken up to the enormity of what was going on and was racing to catch up.” Interpol, Europol and the UN have identified it as one of the fastest growing areas of organized crime. It is increasingly recognized to have the potential to rival drug trafficking in terms of scale and profits. One Italian mafia gang is estimated to make as much money annually from waste crime as the global turnover of McDonald’s.

More than 1,000 illegal waste sites now spring up in England each year. One single site discovered in Northern Ireland is believed to contain 1.5 million tons of illegally deposited waste, which is significantly more municipal waste than the whole of Northern Ireland produces in a year (i.e. 969,157 tons in 2015-2016).

In 2016-2017 Air and Space Evidence received funding from the European Space Agency, Open Data Incubator for Europe (ODINE), and Scottish Environmental Protection Agency to conduct research and trials examining how this problem can be tackled using space technologies. Air and Space Evidence is now launching a much-needed waste crime monitoring service to governments.

Bari, Italy, 22 June 2017. GEO Data Design and IMAGEM have been appointed as a partners by Planetek Italia. Partnership concerns unique Planetek’s platform – Rheticus®.

The contract grants IMAGEM NL and GEO Data Design Ltd. with rights to sell Rheticus® satellite processing services to customers located in the geographic areas where the two companies operate: IMAGEM NL in the Benelux region (Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg), and GEO Data Design Ltd. in South Africa, Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Tanzania.

Rheticus® is a cloud-based platform that delivers fresh and accurate data and information for monitoring of the Earth’s surface transformation phenomena. Rheticus geoinformation service uses a series of industry-focused dashboards to deliver timely and accurate information to policy and decision makers, managers and users for operations and data-driven decision making.

Services available on Rheticus® platform includes, Earth crust subsidence, urban dynamics, forest fires hazard, costal seawater quality as well as many more in the near future.

IMAGEM and GEO Data Design aim to deploy the Rheticus® platform at local governments, environmental and forestry agencies, road and rail, networks (NUTS), construction, mining, heavy industry and more. The platform can be used directly by these customers or by solution providers and system integrators.

“In the Netherlands alone, the cost of damages and repairs to infrastructure above and below ground as a result of deformation is estimated to run into billions of euros in the next decades. With Rheticus, Imagem can now provide our customers with a highly accurate and easy to use online platform that detects subsidence progression over time. This allows users to have an early warning system, avoiding unnecessary risk and cost. Imagem is very pleased to work together with Planetek to make this service available in the Benelux, and connecting it to its Smart M.App platform for use even by non geospatial professionals,” says Patrick de Groot, General Manager at IMAGEM.

After signing the contract, Jaurez Dorfling, Managing Director of GEO Data Design, said: “We are excited to join our experience, reputation, marketing and support capability with the specialist technology and development strengths from Planetek, to deliver cutting edge solutions to the local and international market.”

Giovanni Sylos Labini, CEO at Planetek Italia adds: “We are excited to cooperate with our international partners, IMAGEM and GEO Data Design. Rheticus® will now assist professionals and decision makers in a growing number of countries, relying on the sound professional support of our partners. Born and strengthened under the Hexagon Geospatial network, the cooperation with our partners opens new opportunities to develop and deliver cutting-edge solutions to our markets. Through the integration of the Rheticus® monitoring services in Hexagon Geospatial Smart M.Apps, we can offer insightful analytics and dynamic maps to users worldwide.”

To know more about Rheticus® visit www.rheticus.eu or:

How to join the network of Authorized Resellers

The distribution of Rheticus services is global. Planetek Italia is building a network of valued Authorized Distributors to resell the services and to assist clients worldwide. Several companies in Europe, Central America, Africa and Asia have already joined this innovative business model and started offering Rheticus services to their markets. To be part of this network write at info @ planetek.it
Read more: “https://www.planetek.it/eng/IMAGEM_GDD_new_Rheticus_Authorized_Partners” :https://www.planetek.it/eng/IMAGEM_GDD_new_Rheticus_Authorized_Partners

About Planetek Italia
Planetek Italia is an Italian company established in 1994, providing a broad range of geospatial services including delivery, analysis and processing of satellite data. Premium Partner of Hexagon Geospatial in Italy, Planetek is the creator and operator of the unique Rheticus® cloud platform (www.rheticus.eu), designed for the provision of sophisticated satellite data based monitoring services. For more information, visit www.planetek.it

About IMAGEM
We are IMAGEM, a team of professionals dedicated to communicating location-intelligence and visualising change. We believe in contributing to improving the world we live in. By providing insight to your problems through location based solutions, we help you make smart and informed decisions. We enable you to define your own map of the future. For more information, visit www.imagemnl.com.

About GEO Data Design
GEO Data Design is the preferred geospatial solution provider in Africa with superior technical expertise and turnkey project management through a dynamic and passionate service driven team. GEO Data Design can provide you the best solutions on geospatial processing management software (GIS & Remote Sensing) and satellite imagery, integrating geospatial data (Vector, DEM, Contours) and complete workflows for better decisions. For more information, visit www.geodatadesign.co.za

22 June 2017. ECMWF Member States, gathered in Reading for the 90th session of the Centre’s Council, have approved the proposal by the Italian Government and the Emilia Romagna Region to host ECMWF’s new data centre in Bologna.

The decision was taken on 22 June at the end of a two-day session of Council, the Centre’s governing body, which includes representatives of all its Member States. The Italian proposal to host the Centre’s data centre had been evaluated as part of an international competition and was judged at the beginning of the year to best meet ECMWF’s requirements. Member States then tasked Director-General Florence Rabier with entering into discussions with the Italian Government with a view to having a high-level agreement ready for this session of Council.

After discussions and votes, representatives of ECMWF’s Member States were satisfied with the high-level agreement proposed by Italy and approved Bologna as the host city for ECMWF’s new data centre. The building is to be delivered to ECMWF by 2019 and will host the Centre’s new supercomputers, whilst the Centre’s headquarters are to remain in the UK.


The Head of the Italian National Meteorological Service, Col. Silvio Cau, and ECMWF Director-General Florence Rabier (seated) signed the high-level agreement on the data centre in the presence of representatives from all 22 ECMWF Member States.

Dr Rabier commented: “I am delighted that our Council has decided to support the proposal by Italy to host ECMWF’s new data centre. This new facility will allow us to upgrade our high-performance computing capability to the levels required to continue to advance weather science. The decision-making process has been long, thorough and at times difficult, and we have already incurred some delays which could have an impact on our computing capability within the next couple of years. We are extremely grateful to all our Member States, who have taken great care to ensure that ECMWF’s best interests would prevail. Of course I want to especially thank the Italian authorities, who have worked tirelessly to ensure that their proposal meets all the required criteria. Having our headquarters in the UK and our data centre in Italy will be a new experience which will illustrate perfectly well the truly intergovernmental nature of ECMWF.”

The President of Council, Professor Miguel Miranda, added: “Weather forecasts in each of the Member States, and indeed far beyond, rely on ECMWF continuing to produce and deliver the best numerical prediction in the world. Today’s decision will enable the Centre to start planning in earnest for the procurement of its next supercomputing system. On behalf of our Council of Member States, I want to join the Director-General in expressing our gratitude to all Member States, who have participated actively in this process. The new Data Centre will be located in Italy, with significant support from the government and the Emilia Romagna region. There is still a lot to do to ensure that the premises will be fit for purpose in two years’ time, and we cannot but be impressed by the enthusiasm and the ardour the Italian team has put into this project so far. ECMWF is an example of European nations pooling their resources to achieve the best possible outcome. ECMWF was created 40 years ago and there are major challenges ahead in today’s world marked by a changing climate.”

“This result – said the Italian Minister of Environment Gian Luca Galletti – is a great success for Italy. The new data centre in Bologna will allow ECMWF to continue its important work in studying weather phenomena as a strategic element for sustainable economic progress and citizen security. Now Bologna is at the centre of the global environmental challenges. This will further enhance the skills, the ability to innovate, the attractive pole of environmental data which are the heritage of the city. This is the result – said Galletti – of impressive teamwork of many Italian institutions, such as the Ministries of Environment, Education, Defence, Foreign Affairs, Economy and Finance, the Emilia Romagna Region with President Stefano Bonaccini, the municipality of Bologna with Major Virginio Merola, and the Alma Mater University with rector Francesco Ubertini. I want to thank Director-General Rabier and President Miranda of ECMWF, together with all Member States: this is a responsibility that Bologna will surely honour.”

ECMWF’s ten-year Strategy adopted in 2016 sets ambitious goals for Earth system modelling at high resolution. It specifies a target of a 5 km grid spacing for ensemble forecasts by 2025, down from 18 km today. An intermediate step will be the implementation of a 9 km ensemble in 2020–2021. These resolution upgrades will require a new high-performance computing facility with approximately ten times as much computational capacity as is currently available to ECMWF, some of which will come from more processors. The new facility in Bologna will give us the flexibility to accommodate the latest technologies in supercomputing.

Further information
The Council Resolution on the location of the new ECMWF data centre

Toulouse, 22 June 2017 – Airbus, together with non-profit organisation The Forest Trust (TFT) and radar satellite imagery expert SarVision, have launched Starling, an innovative satellite service enabling companies to demonstrate how they are implementing their ‘No Deforestation’ commitments.

The commercial launch follows a successful six-month pilot phase in Ferrero and Nestlé’s palm oil supply chains, during which Starling has underlined its ability for unbiased monitoring of large areas on a regular basis while detecting and identifying forest cover changes with utmost accuracy. A webinar will be hosted on 29 June to show how Starling is supporting the genuine transformation of the palm oil industry by using an advanced combination of optical and radar satellite technology.

Over the past year, the number of companies making commitments to cut deforestation in their operations has risen by 22 percent to 447. Until now, verifying progress of these commitments has been challenging, with brands and producers relying on ground-based checks by auditing firms which are ultimately limited in the amount of land they can cover and how they can monitor change. With commercial agriculture for palm, soy, cattle, timber and pulp responsible for at least two-thirds of global tropical deforestation, companies making forestry conservation pledges have been asking for a reliable verification tool to prove their commitments are working.

Starling provides unprecedented accuracy because of a combination of 1.5m SPOT images and radar that cuts through cloud cover, allowing year-round monitoring. This accuracy also means that Starling can easily differentiate between crop types and between replanting and deforestation. It provides and promotes transparency, allowing companies to demonstrate their commitments as well as manage their operations, reward best practice and contribute to the transformation of the wider palm oil industry.

“Ferrero is continuously committed to finding innovative solutions able to support our efforts towards a more sustainable development,” said Aldo Cristiano, Director Global Procurement Raw Materials and Group Sustainability for Ferrero. “With this in mind, and building on our achievement of 100 percent traceability of our palm oil supply to mill and 98.5 percent to plantation, Ferrero started piloting the Starling service over a few selected plantations. The first results are very positive. We are confident this could be the start of a successful journey in verifying the implementation of our No Deforestation policy”.

“Nestlé is engaged in zero deforestation by 2020 for all its supply chain. Today, even if 91 percent of our palm oil supply could be traced back to the mill, only 57 percent meets our group’s sustainability commitments. To accelerate the verification and the commitment of our suppliers, Starling will allow real time measurement and monitoring of our impact on forest preservation. Starling will help us to do better and faster by co-working with our suppliers,” said Pierre-Alexandre Teulié, Head of Corporate Communications, Public Affairs, e-Business and CSR at Nestlé France.

“The pilot phase, and especially the satisfaction of our customers, once again confirms our cutting-edge expertise in the forestry domain, relying on our land cover analysis tool and the unique capabilities of our SPOT satellites,” said François Lombard, Head of the Intelligence Business Cluster at Airbus Defence and Space.

“Starling is ultimately about democratising the verification process by making it more straightforward and accessible,” said Bastien Sachet, Chief Executive of TFT . “Unlike auditing, Starling is unbiased – the information is there in its purest form, allowing companies to show to their stakeholders and clients what is happening on the ground. Many companies have worked hard to create values-based policies and drive transformation in their supply chains. Starling offers a simple and cost-effective way of measuring this effort and creating opportunities for engagement.”

For more information, visit the Starling webpage

19 June 2017. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing will be used to transform big data harvested from Space into targeted and easy-to-use applications for emergency management, precision agriculture, environmental monitoring and safety

On Monday 19 June 2017, at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget, Leonardo announced the signing of an agreement between e-GEOS and the US-based company Orbital Insight to provide revolutionary satellite services. The partnership will see the convergence of Space technologies and big data analytics to provide radically new products and services for numerous applications including emergency management, precision agriculture, environmental monitoring and safety.

With the support of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the collaboration between the two companies will allow cloud computing solutions and innovative machine learning/artificial intelligence techniques developed by Orbital Insight to be used to analyse high-resolution satellite images. The images, which e-GEOS acquires from the COSMO-SkyMed Earth observation satellite system and processes, can also be supplemented with data from other information sources.

To give an example, satellite radar images could be used to help generate a comprehensive picture of an area’s economic activity and urban development. By combining different strands of information, such as the income and consumption levels of the people that live there and the intensity of agricultural activities, it is possible to produce ‘poverty maps’ to help decision makers define support or growth policies. The use of Space imagery means that this kind of information can even be provided in regions which, due to a lack of funds to carry out ad hoc surveys or due to current conflicts, have little usable official data available.

“Space already provides an unimaginable quantity of information for a multitude of uses; the real challenge is working out how best to use it”, said Luigi Pasquali, Director of Leonardo’s Space Sector and CEO of Telespazio (a 67-33% joint venture between Leonardo and Thales). “The most sophisticated big data analytics solutions today come from the commercial sector, which are making it possible to manage and process the huge amount of information generated every day by space sensors, by a wide variety of data-gathering platforms and by industry, government organizations and citizens. Our partnership with Orbital Insight will combine our extensive experience in the processing of satellite data with these innovative new techniques, allowing us to offer new services and applications”.

“Our mission is to bring transparency to global socio-economic trends, and to do that, we need as much imagery to analyze as possible,” said Dr. James Crawford, founder and CEO of Orbital Insight. “SAR imagery greatly increases our capabilities by allowing us to track changes on the ground even through cloud cover or at night.”

“This agreement with Orbital Insight, a leading geospatial analytics company, confirms that SAR data is an integral component of satellite datasets,” said Massimo Claudio Comparini, CEO of e-GEOS and Director of Geoinformation Line of Business of Telespazio. “We are excited to work in this new field with Orbital Insight, following our development strategy in digital space transformation based on the analysis and integration of data that’s globally acquired.”

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