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Understanding our planet and the impact of climate change: a vexing question for several years now. How is Europe actually facing climate change and its impact? To take necessary actions and measurements, policymakers and public authorities need reliable and up-to-date information. Information on how our planet and climate are changing. This is why the European Union set up the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Remote sensing as a driver to develop EU information services

Copernicus is the EU’s Earth observation programme. It addresses six thematic areas, one of which is the Copernicus Climate Change Service . With an ever-growing global population, our planet is suffering the consequences of human-induced climate change. To mitigate the effects we need to act now. The European Commission is investing millions in Earth-observation programmes. Thanks to these programmes various remote sensing techniques are being developed. Techniques and solutions that are necessary for gathering, combining and analysing various types of Earth-observation data and climate indicators to identify the drivers, and to forecast the expected impact.

Climate information about past, current and future states

Via the C3S online service portal, users will have access to information that assists in monitoring and predicting climate change, and that will therefore help to support adaptation and mitigation. The C3S service portal combines climate observations with the latest scientific methods to develop, quality-assured information about past, current and future states of the climate in Europe and worldwide.

VITO Remote Sensing has more than 20 years of experience in the production and analysis of global time series. In the Copernicus Climate Change Service, VITO Remote Sensing, together with the consortium partners, is responsible for delivering long-term series of global data on three Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) to the Climate Data Store (CDS). These ECVs are: Leaf Area Index (LAI), the fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fAPAR) and surface albedo. The Climate Data Records (CDRs) cover a period of more than 35 years, stretching from 1991 to the present.

Read more on https://blog.vito.be/remotesensing

In January of 2017, the National Land Service of Lithuania under the Ministry of Agriculture hosted a formal hearing about a Copernicus Sentinel feasibility study. The results of the study were highly favourable for the Sentinel products and were positively evaluated by experts. As a result, it was formally decided to develop a national archive of production-ready Sentinel imagery with open access for the public and to start using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 products at a national level for all geospatial applications related to agriculture, forestry and environment protection.

On January 12, 2017, the National Land Service of Lithuania under the Ministry of Agriculture – an institution responsible for implementation of geospatial information procurement and geospatial information policy coordination in Lithuania – hosted a formal hearing about “Feasibility study of Sentinel satellite mapping usage for the detection of abandoned arable land”. The study, executed and delivered by GEOMATRIX UAB”:http://www.geomatrix.lt/cms/index.php, a Copernicus Relay in Lithuania, showed findings regarding the use of Sentinel products for mapping of abandoned arable land. The main goal of the study was to develop automated processing algorithms and carry out testing of the use of Sentinel data for detection and mapping of abandoned or under-exploited arable land. The study also compared Sentinel-2 imagery with the commercial products used since 2011 for annual updates of the National abandoned arable land database.

The results were highly favourable for the Sentinel products and were positively evaluated by a group of experts representing key stakeholders from several institutions under the Ministry of Agriculture. It was formally decided to develop a national archive of production-ready Sentinel imagery with open access for the public and, most importantly, to start using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 products at a national level for all geospatial applications related to agriculture, forestry and environment protection. The implementation process will start early this year – so Lithuania is formally joining the Copernicus user club thanks to the availability of the full, free and open data.

Anzelma Ūselienė, the coordinator at the International Collaboration department of the Lithuanian Science, Innovation and Technology Agency, expressed her enthusiasm about the Copernicus Programme development in Lithuania: This kind of success stories prove that Copernicus contributes towards the development of new innovative applications and services, tailored to the needs of specific groups of users. It supports the efforts to identify, respond and adapt to global phenomena. Furthermore thanks to the full, free and open data policy it gives rise to new value-added applications, uses and markets, stimulates companies to explore new fields, business opportunities and fosters job creation.

Below is a list of information services based on Sentinel products that will be fully implemented on a national scale in 2017:

  • Mapping of abandoned and under-exploited arable land;
  • Detection of arable land with faulty drainage infrastructure;
  • Operational monitoring of farming activities for Common Agricultural Policy subsidies control.

A new service requested by the Lithuanian Environment Agency and currently under development:

  • Operational monitoring and assessment of biophysical conditions of wetlands and peatlands;
  • Operational monitoring of forest clear-cuts and re-forestation.

The Lithuanian government is taking steps to take agricultural policy and environment management into the space age. It is an excellent example of how a government is embracing Copernicus-based technological advancements to foster industrial innovation, sustainable management of the environment, preserving natural resources and building a better future for its citizens.

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The Sentinel-2 mission provides unprecedented multi-spectral observations with a five-day revisit at the equator, a spatial resolution of up to 10 meters and systematic global coverage of the Earth’s land surface. The operational provision of globally and temporally consistent data provided by Sentinel-2 is expected to allow unmatched characterization of dynamic surface processes from national to continental scales.

Sentinel-2A was launched on the 23rd of June 2015 and was most recently joined by Sentinel-2B on the 7th of March 2017 as part of the European Earth Observation (EO) program Copernicus led by the European Commission, in which ESA is the coordinator of the Space Component and operates the Sentinel-2 mission.

The Sentinel-2 mission consists of two identical satellites and with recurrent satellite units ensuring long-term operational observations for the next 20 years. All Sentinel-2 data are available to users under a free and open data policy, which underpins the development of long-term, sustainable EO applications.

This special issue will report on the status of the mission, quality of the Sentinel-2 products and innovative research results based on Sentinel-2 observations. The wealth of information provided by improved data quality, resolution and increased temporal frequency together with the sheer data volume calls for innovative algorithms and new data exploitation strategies, for example such as those linked to cloud computing capabilities. Furthermore, dense time series over large geographic regions provided by Sentinel-2 as well as opportunities for combining the data with that from complementary systems, such as Landsat-8, allow for studies of natural and human-induced processes in unparalleled detail.

In particular, this Sentinel-2 special issue will focus on the following topics:

  • Sentinel-2 mission
  • Sentinel-2 products quality and cal/val approaches
  • Atmospheric correction and cloud screening methods
  • Agriculture
  • Aquatic ecosystems:
  • * Inland water quality
  • * Coral reef monitoring
  • Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services
  • Biophysical variables retrieval
  • Coastal mapping and monitoring
  • Data fusion and multi-sensor data integration techniques
  • Disaster risk reduction and recovery
  • Forest mapping and monitoring
  • Land cover and its change
  • Land degradation and soil condition
  • Natural hazards
  • Snow and ice mapping
  • * Glaciers
  • * Sea Ice
  • Time series analysis & hotspot detection
  • Urban mapping
  • Water resources management

In the spirit of Open Science, we aim to support accepted publications included in this special issue as open access. ESA funds the open access with the support of Elsevier for up to 24 papers accepted within this Sentinel-2 special issue.

Submissions are due by September 30th, 2017. Submit your paper under the “Sentinel-2 Science Special Issue” using RSE’s online submission system. The authors are kindly requested to follow RSE author guidelines. The Sentinel-2 special issue will follow the concept of a virtual special issue which ensures a timely publication of the individual accepted papers.

Guest Editors,
Bianca Hoersch, Benjamin Koetz, and Alan Belward
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20 February 2017. ESA announced it has adopted an Open Access policy for its content such as still images, videos and selected sets of data.

For more than two decades, ESA has been sharing vast amounts of information, imagery and data with scientists, industry, media and the public at large via digital platforms such as the web and social media. ESA’s evolving information management policy increases these opportunities.

In particular, a new Open Access policy for ESA’s information and data will now facilitate broadest use and reuse of the material for the general public, media, the educational sector, partners and anybody else seeking to utilise and build upon it.

“This evolution in opening access to ESA’s images, information and knowledge is an important element of our goal to inform, innovate, interact and inspire in the Space 4.0 landscape,” said Jan Woerner, ESA Director General. “It logically follows the free and open data policies we have already established and accounts for the increasing interest of the general public, giving more insight to the taxpayers in the member states who fund the Agency.

ESA, international organisations and Creative Commons

In conjunction with many other intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) such as the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the World Health Organisation, who have recently adopted similar Open Access policies, ESA has decided to release more contents under the Creative Commons IGO licencing scheme, with the Open Access compliant Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO or, in short, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO licence as the standard.

CC IGO licences were designed for use by intergovernmental organisations and allow, in the case of CC BY-SA IGO, for example, images to be widely used on Wikipedia and its media repository Wikimedia Commons.

Over the past two years, ESA has trialled use of the CC BY-SA IGO licences and released images from the popular Rosetta comet-chasing mission, sets of Mars images as well as other imagery under that credit.

Creative Commons is a global non-profit organisation that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. It continues to be a major partner and facilitator with ESA and the other international organisations in using and further developing the licences.

Marco Trovatello, who follows the project for ESA, believes that “Free and open access to ESA’s knowledge, information and data are a cornerstone regarding our link with the larger public and user communities and will thus contribute to societal benefit.”

The ESA digital agenda

“The recognition of the value of information ESA holds on behalf of its member states and the appropriate management are key instruments of ESA’s Space 4.0 approach to reinforcing collaboration with industry, science and member states,” notes Gunther Kohlhammer, who as Chief Digital Officer oversees the ESA Digital Agenda for Space and ESA’s information management policy, the large projects that make ESA fit for a fully digital future.

Why subsets of content?

Many of ESA’s images, videos and other contents are produced with partners, for example, in science and industry. In this first phase of Open Access at ESA, priority is given to material that is either fully owned by ESA or for which third-party rights have already been cleared.

What is Open Access?

Generally speaking, Open Access stands for free and unrestricted online access to research results and findings. Usage rights are often granted via Creative Commons Licences. There is not one, but various statements and definitions of Open Access, such as the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the Budapest Open Access Initiative or the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.

Further information

A website pointing to sets of content already available under Open Access, a set of Frequently Asked Questions and further background information can be found at http://open.esa.int
More information on the ESA Digital Agenda for Space is available at http://www.esa.int/digital

London, 29 March 2017 – Interoute, owner operator of a global cloud services platform and one of Europe’s largest and most advanced networks, has been selected by Spacemetric to support its data storage and distribution needs. Spacemetric is a Swedish software company which streamlines the transformation of raw data from satellite and airborne sensors into imagery products ready for analytics.


Interoute to provide Spacemetric with secure storage solution for satellite data, supports EU earth observation program for environmental and humanitarian research

Sentinel-3 Satellite

This secure storage solution will be integrated with the web-based SWEA (Swedish Earth data Access) platform, developed by Spacemetric on behalf of the Swedish National Space Board. The platform is part of the existing EU earth observation program Copernicus managed by the European Space Agency (ESA). The data is collected and used to support environmental and humanitarian research. The ESA’s archive of images is available to scientists and businesses across the world via the cloud. The archive, hosted by Interoute’s private cloud network, is shared widely – from governments to entrepreneurs looking for ways to turn the data into business opportunities. SWEA can now ensure the availability of data with specific relevance to Swedish users.

Interoute Virtual Data Centre zone in Stockholm launched 6 months ago and is one of 17 global zones that make up Interoute private networked cloud.

“We chose Interoute as they could offer an efficient hybrid solution combining physical storage with the Interoute Virtual Data Centre in Stockholm. As a result, we are guaranteed secure storage of local data as well as superior access due to low latency. It also means that the development process is more agile, making it possible to quickly and easily scale our efforts up or down depending on demand”, said Mikael Stern, CEO at Spacemetric.

Matthew Finnie, Interoute CTO, commented: “It’s fantastic to be selected by Spacemetric for this exciting project supporting the EU earth observation program for environmental and humanitarian research. Interoute was the first global cloud provider to launch a zone in the Nordic region that offers both plic and private cloud on one platform. And our Stockholm cloud zone is one of 17 global zones that make up our private networked cloud. This new project is validation that the ‘local presence, global reach’ approach to cloud is key to meeting the needs of the market in Europe”

About Interoute
Interoute is the owner-operator of one of Europe’s largest networks and a global cloud services platform which encompasses 15 data centres, 17 virtual data centres and 33 colocation centres, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centres across Europe. Its full-service Unified ICT platform serves international enterprises and many of the world’s leading service providers, as well as governments and universities. Interoute’s Unified ICT strategy provides solutions for enterprises seeking connectivity and a scalable, secure advanced platform on which they can build their voice, video, computing and data services, as well as service providers in need of high capacity international data transit and infrastructure. With established operations throughout Europe and USA, Interoute also owns and operates 24 connected city networks within Europe’s major business centres. www.interoute.com

About Spacemetric
Spacemetric is a software company streamlining the transformation of raw data from satellite and airborne sensors into imagery products ready for analytics. Lars Edgardh and Torbjrn Westin co-founded Spacemetric in 1999 to turn the craft of satellite image production into a flexible industrial process. Today the company delivers affordable, high-performance software solutions for all types of geospatial imagery to sensor operators, solution integrators and large users of image data in both the civilian and defence sectors. The Keystone Image Management System is Spacemetric’s software data hub for handling, processing and serving geospatial imagery from any type of flying or orbiting imaging sensor. It is based on rigorous photogrammetric techniques that ensure high quality results and rapid data delivery while minimising costs by enabling extensive use of on-demand services that minimise the necessary processing and storage footprint.

A new processing tool has been developed to bundle information contained in large amounts of satellite data, paving the way for the wealth of Copernicus Sentinel satellite data to be more easily incorporated into online environment-monitoring services.

ESA’s online Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) makes information from satellite data available for the non-expert user for urban environment monitoring. To do this, it processes hundreds of terabytes of data gathered by Earth-observing satellites, and translates them into easy-to-use products for scientists, urban planners and decision-makers.

U-TEP reached a milestone recently with the integration of some 450,000 scenes from the US Landsat-8 mission acquired between 2013 and 2015. The 500TB was reduced to about 25TB thanks to the TimeScan processor developed by the DLR German Aerospace Center. The resulting TimeScan Landsat 2015 product is already available on the U-TEP geobrowser. This novel tool that distils a single information product from a multitude of satellite scenes is a step towards more efficient access, processing and analysis of the massive amount of high-resolution image data provided by the latest satellites.

Cloud computing

The Copernicus Sentinel satellites, for example, are supplying an unprecedented wealth of measurements. By the end of 2017, the operational Sentinel-1, -2 and -3 satellites alone will continuously collect a daily volume of about 20TB of open and free satellite imagery. In the past, users had to individually download and process data on their own computers. Now, mass data can be directly archived and processed at the point of reception for maximum speed and efficiency.

Within U-TEP, user algorithms are brought to the data where they run in cloud computing environments. This avoids the transfer of large amounts of input data and makes it unnecessary for the individual user to set up inhouse computing services.

In the near future, the TimeScan approach will be used by the U-TEP team to process both Landsat optical imagery and Sentinel-1 radar data to automatically map human settlements with unprecedented precision: 10 m resolution. This will help entities such as scientists, urban planners, environmental agencies or development banks to better understand urbanisation, as well as respond to the challenges posed by growing cities, population increase, climate change and loss of biodiversity.

Data applications

The data processed by TimeScan will not only benefit urban monitoring, but also land use/land cover mapping, agriculture, forestry, the monitoring of polar and coastal regions, risk management and disaster prevention, or natural resource management.

The TimeScan processor is being used at the DLR, IT4Innovation and Brockmann Consult processing centres to create products based on Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Landsat data.

U-TEP is one of six Thematic Exploitation Platforms developed by ESA to serve data user communities. These cloud-based platforms provide an online environment to access information, processing tools and computing resources for collaboration. TEPs allow knowledge to be extracted from large environmental datasets produced through Europe’s Copernicus programme and other Earth observation satellites.

The animation (Click on the image above) shows the TimeScan Landsat data derived for the Pearl River delta in China for 2002–03 and 2014–15. The illustrated TimeScan RGB images are composed of the temporal maximum built-up index in red, the maximum vegetation index in green and the temporal mean value of the water index in blue. A specific image analysis algorithm developed by DLR in ESA’s SAR4Urban project uses the TimeScan data to map the extent of the built-up area (highlighted in black in the animation) in order to finally pinpoint the urban growth that took place in the region over the last 10 years. (Copyright: DLR)

Source: ESA.

This is the last image of the Indian Ocean Region taken by Meteosat-7 on 31 March at 11:30 to 12:00 UTC.


Meteosat-7’s last image, taken on 31 March 2017

On 3 April 2017 at 21:25 CET, the thrusters started firing, the first in a week of manoeuvres that will take the satellite to its ultimate resting place in graveyard orbit, about 300km above the geostationary ring.

More information on the “graveyard orbit” and how Meteosat-7 will get there, can be found in the EUMETSAT Science Blog . Keep an eye on the EUMETSAT Science Blog and website for updates on this event.

Meteosat-7 is the last of the first generation Meteosats, geostationary weather satellites that shaped the success story of satellite meteorology in Europe. Modern weather forecasting began 40 years ago, with the launch of Meteosat-1. In 2016, when the EC approved the Space Strategy for Europe, it recognised the Meteosat programme as a key European success story.

With almost 20 years in orbit, Meteosat-7 also has had the longest operational lifetime of any European meteorological satellite.

Meteosat-7 Facts and Figures

Meteosat-7 (launched on 2 September 1997) was developed under the Meteosat Transition Programme (MTP). It was designed to fill the gap between the Meteosat Operational Programme (encompassing Meteosat-4 to -6) and the first satellite of the second generation, Meteosat-8 (launched on 28 August 2002).

The satellite provided the prime 0° longitude Full Earth Scan Service from 3 June 1998 until it was replaced by Meteosat-8 on 16 May 2006. On 11 July 2006, Meteosat-7 moved to the Indian Ocean where it arrived on 10 October 2006. It became the prime provider of the Indian Ocean Data Coverage (IODC) Service at 57.5° East on 5 December 2006 until 1 February 2017, when Meteosat-8 took over.

Space Apps NYC takes its overall direction from NASA’s Space Apps incubator program who sets the tone of the hackathon each year. They determine the global main stage, the hackathon theme and challenges, and where to deploy NASA resources and speakers.

The rest is up to the local organizers (that’s us). We at Space Apps NYC are all volunteers who have participated in a previous Space Apps Challenge event. Most of us are technical, but just like our community, we have a diverse background. Few of us have production and fund raising experience, the only qualification is a passion for space innovation in NYC.

What Are Space Apps NYC’s Core Objectives and What Is Its Approach to Reach Those Objectives?

Our core objectives are to:

Cultivate innovation in the NASA and the greater space industry through open sourced communities

Promote STEM among women and underrepresented demographics in the field

We have a community of over 1800 hackers who are made up of technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, software developers, students, and anyone else interested in space exploration. Everyone comes together for one weekend and teams up to solve high reaching challenges posed by NASA. They use open sourced data sets and technologies to build innovative products which are then presented at the end of the weekend. At Space Apps NYC we do our best to promote these projects outside of the event in order to facilitate extending and funding these projects within other incubator programs.

We also run a Women in Data bootcamp series leading up to the hackathon. It’s our goal to bring in women in leadership and technical positions to speak to our community, and to run technical workshops with a female attendance of over 50%, most of whom are still in school.

What Is the Core Service That Space Apps NYC Delivers and What Makes This a Unique Proposition to Its Audience?

Our core distinction is NASA. There are many hackathons around the city, country, and world, but this hackathon is unique in that NASA posts the challenges, and those projects which do well are adopted and developed further by NASA and its affiliate organizations. This is an opportunity to basically work with NASA in developing next gen space exploration technology. We offer open NASA data sets, sometimes opened for this event, and hackers have the ability to work with and ask questions from NASA reps in developing their ideas.

Space Apps NYC also runs a Commercial Space, Science, and Frontier Technologies conference the same weekend as the hackathon, which is free for all our registered hackers. The conference attracts leaders in the commercial space industry, including astronauts, who give talks related to their domain expertise. Through these talks our hackers are given context around the challenges posed to them by Space Apps, and are also encouraged to mingle with our speakers and VIP guests throughout the conference.

What Are Space Apps NYC’s Growth Objectives over the next 5 Years?

Each year our local community is growing beyond most other locations globally. This year is our first expansion, we merged with Space Apps Brooklyn, and we plan on opening more locations in other boroughs and around the city. Only ~10% of our community get to participate at an NYC location each year due to venue constraints, and we plan on solving that problem.

Space Apps NYC runs the Commercial Space, Science, and Frontier Technologies conference, going on its 3rd year. It is the largest space conference in NYC and the largest amateur space conference in the country. In 2015 we were designated the Space Apps global main stage location for the second time in a row, and the conference’s original purpose was to provide a platform for the numerous speakers that came with that title. The conference has taken off and we are using it to promote NYC’s tech, VC, maker, scientific, and academic communities and establish NYC as a new international space hub.

What Competitive Changes Does Space Apps NYC Envisage Within the Space Industry over the next 5 Years and What Impact Will This Have on Space Apps NYC?

More and more engineering teams at NASA, JPL, and other affiliate organizations are open sourcing their software. This is a huge opportunity to engage with the wider community to spark innovation and contribute back to these initiatives. NASA is at heart an innovation organization. They conceptualize, design, and develop the technologies of tomorrow with the intention of commercial space industries adopting and developing these technologies further. So many new companies will be born out of this growing commercialization of space.

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(Guildford, UK, March 2017) Earth-i, the innovative British distributor of earth observation imagery and services, is following up their successful tender award from the Government of Queensland by supporting the upcoming International Symposium on Digital Earth & Locate 17 Conference which will be held in Sydney from 3rd to 6th of April 2017.

The Queensland Department of Natural Resources chose Earth-i and their data to map their entire State because, in the words of Steve Jacoby, Executive Director of Land and Spatial Information, the company; “demonstrated a clear understanding of our needs in Queensland and the DMC3 / TripleSat Constellation provides us and other Queensland government departments with both the wide area capability and the very high resolution imagery required to meet the needs of the user community”.

At the forthcoming Symposium and Conference, Earth-i looks forward to meeting with many other key users and members of what is a mature remote sensing community. Australia makes its geo-coded National Address File freely available online and developments such as the Queensland Globe, which will allow users to view and explore the State’s spatial data shows how the country is embracing the benefits that thinking spatially can bring.

Dr Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse, Chair & Convenor of the Locate17 and Digital Earth Symposium Organising Committee, noted that “Both government and the private sector will be able to identify opportunities based on what is happening around the world”. He says: “Geospatial data underpins many disruptive and innovative organisations. Without it, companies like Uber would not be in business.”
Earth-i is perfectly placed to suport this burgeoning industry; their data from three satellites represents a combination of imagery with the right resolution and an ability to re-visit the area of interest within the right timescale.

Commercial Director, Paul Majmader explains more about his trip to the Locate 17 Conference and what he hopes to achieve during his time in Australia; “I have been attending the Locate conferences for a number of years now and am always impressed by the advanced approach Australia takes with geospatial data and services.

Earth-i is keen to engage with further members of the Australian geospatial community and hopefully support further projects with our data and services. The DMC3 2016 archive covers a large proportion of Australia with 80cm data – we are keen to understand the interest in maintaining an annual coverage and distributing this on a wider basis.”

Click to visit the International Symposium on Digital Earth & Locate 17 Conference website and follow this link for more on Earth-i imagery

Earth-i: (www.earthi.space) is a British company dedicated to facilitating the distribution of data from the DMC3/TripleSat Constellation. As the prime master distributor appointed by 21AT, Earth-i provides a portal for data users wishing to take advantage of the advanced data and services made possible by this uniquely capable Earth Observation satellite constellation.

Earth-i is co-located on the Surrey Research Park in the UK with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, the manufacturer of the DMC3/TripleSat constellation. www.earthi.space www.sstl.co.uk

Vietnam targets to self-develop Lotusat-2 by 2022 when its technical facilities for satellite research, assembly, integration and testing are ready to operate, according to the Vietnam National Satellite Center (VNSC).

Pham Anh Tuan, director of VNSC, was quoted by local Nhan Dan (People) newspaper as saying on Friday that after developing one-kilogram PicoDragon, the first Vietnamese self-produced mini satellite which was sent into the orbit in 2013, his center will continue a project of satellite manufacturing to make NanoDragon (weighing 4-6 kg), MicroDragon (50 kg) and Lotusat (600 kg).

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