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(by Tereza Pultarova — March 15, 2017) LONDON — Airbus will add a third node to the European Data Relay System (EDRS) constellation of satellites that use laser links to download live imagery from Earth-observation satellites and provide military communications that are virtually impossible to intercept. – See more at: http://spacenews.com/spacedatahighway-to-add-third-node-for-global-coverage/#sthash.KwgPk3D9.dpuf

The third node, EDRS-D, to be positioned in geostationary orbit above the Asia Pacific region in 2020 or 2021, will expand the constellation’s coverage to near global with some residual blind spots to remain over North America and the northern Pacific Ocean.

The advanced laser telecommunication terminal to be developed by Airbus’ subsidiary Tesat Spacecom will for the first time allow transmitting data between geostationary satellites via laser links. The two EDRS payloads in orbit today lack the ability to talk directly to each other.

“With EDRS-D, we will be able to retrieve data, for example, from a Sentinel satellite over Australia and backbone it via EDRS-D to EDRS-A and downlink it in Europe,” said Hughes Boulnois, who heads the EDRS project at Airbus.

Dubbed the SpaceDataHighway, or the optical fiber in the sky, EDRS can transmit up to 40 terabytes of data per day in near-real-time at a data rate of 1.8 Gbps — almost three times higher than the U.S. Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, which relies on Ku- and Ka-bands.

The first node of the constellation, EDRS-A, is hosted on Eutelsat-9B spacecraft in geostationary orbit at 9 degrees east. Launched in January 2016, the laser terminal started commercial operations in November, servicing the European Commission’s Sentinel-1A Earth-observation satellite, part of the Copernicus program.

OHB SE of Bremen, Germany, is building the second EDRS satellite, EDRS-C, with a launch expected by the end of this year.

“The European Commission is very happy about the performance of the service,” said Boulnois. “We have demonstrated that we can deliver up to 50 percent more data from Sentinel-1A than what is possible with the X-band channel.”

EDRS-C, to be positioned at 31 east, will provide redundancy over Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, and extend the constellation’s coverage out to Singapore. Unlike EDRS-A, EDRS-C will be a dedicated satellite operated by Airbus hosting an additional payload from Avanti, the U.K.-based telecoms provider.

Airbus is currently looking for a partner to host the newly announced Asia-Pacific EDRS-D node.

“Airbus is not such a strong player in Asia Pacific so we need a partner that would allow us to expand our reach,” Boulnois said. “Also, from the economical perspective it makes more sense to combine forces with an operator, bringing the EDRS capability and identifying strong synergies with their telecom mission.”

Airbus expects EDRS-D will bring about a step change in EDRS services. Both, EDRS-A and EDRS-C only have one laser communications terminal. For EDRS-D, Airbus plans at least three terminals, which will enable the node to serve multiple customers at the same time.

In addition to downlinking data from low-Earth-orbiting satellites, Airbus is also eyeing the military aviation and unmanned aerial vehicle communications market in the Asia Pacific region.

“This area, from the security perspective, has some challenges and we can see that our customers are asking for more resilience, more secure communication,” Boulnois said.

“We are currently performing demonstrations and in-flight tests with our A310 [Multi Role Tanker Transport] platform to demonstrate air-to-geostationary connectivity via laser links, and we know already that customers are really interested in the key features of this technology,” he said.

Those key features, Boulnois said, are low probability of intercept, low probability of detection, high bandwidth and “the fact that you cannot jam it.”

Boulnois hinted Airbus is already pondering a fourth node to cover North America.

The EDRS constellation, a public-private partnership between Airbus and the European Space Agency, is currently serving only one customer – the European Commission’s Copernicus Earth-observation program. The laser links enable data from the low-Earth-orbiting satellites to be accessed immediately upon acquisition, eliminating the waiting for the satellite to fly over its ground station. The four Sentinel satellites in orbit — 1A, 1B, 2A and 2B — all have laser communications terminals capable of using the SpaceDataHighway.

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13 March 2017 Spacemetric and Artificial Intelligence experts Simularity are partnering to improve pinpointing of significant changes in huge volumes of digital imagery.

With rapidly increasing volumes of imagery from satellite and other platforms, such as drones and video sensors, the challenge is to extract the anomalous changes from the predictable, everyday ones and spurious noise. Suppression of noise is a key factor determining the quality of change results, with poorly aligned data a major source of false signals and accurate geometrical coregistration of the imagery a critical but often overlooked prerequisite.

Simularity is the AI company that has developed the Automatic Image Anomaly Detection System (AI-ADS). They found a perfect match in Spacemetric’s Keystone technology which enables high-accuracy image coregistration to give customer’s true true “tip and cue” intel from their data. This high-fidelity information source has a wide range of applications such as identifying unexpected activity in remote areas, spotting illegal development in urban areas and monitoring border regions for potential threats.

“Until now, it’s been a real challenge for us to have properly aligned images for our AI to learn what’s normal on the ground, and then detect when something significant happens in an area of interest. With Spacemetric’s Keystone platform, not only can our customers get faster and more accurate anomaly predictions, but to do this from a broad range of image sources including drones and video makes this a game changer”
– Liz Derr, CEO, Simularity Inc.

“Smart change detection is something our customers are asking for, so by applying the Simularity AI-ADS to our image data we can deliver powerful insights to them in a timely manner”.
– Bob Moll, Managing Director, Spacemetric BV.


Simularity AI-ADS differentiating a localised fire as “Hotspot Anomaly” in Syria

About Spacemetric: Spacemetric is a leading provider of image management solutions for satellite and airborne sensors, delivering enhanced data access and streamlined processing from image acquisition to analysis. Solutions are built around the company’s Keystone Image Management System which forms the core of our engagements with sensor operators, data providers and solution integrators to meet demanding operational needs.

e-GEOS, a joint venture between Telespazio (80%) and the Italian Space Agency (20%), and Beijing Vastitude Technology, Chinese company active in the field of remote sensing and geo-information, have signed a multi-year agreement for the distribution in China of satellite data and related operational services generated by the Italian COSMO-SkyMed constellation.

Under this agreement, e-GEOS will provide satellite data to Beijing Vastitude Technology, its exclusive dealer in China, through a local ground station (CUT: Commercial User Terminal). The Italian company, in collaboration with the local partner, will also develop value-added services for monitoring the Chinese territory and its stability.

Intended for the needs of local institutions and companies, satellite monitoring will ensure pinpoint accuracy of the information, providing the support necessary to check phenomena such as urban subsidence and landslides, or for the safety of major infrastructure such as railways and pipelines.

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(17 February 2017) In line with the start of the next phase in the French-German MERLIN climate mission, SCISYS has received a contract from Airbus DS GmbH for the realisation of the Payload Operations Centre (PLOC) for the LIDAR instrument on the MERLIN satellite.

The PLOC is responsible for the automated preparation, generation and validation of commands to control the LIDAR instrument aboard the satellite, as well as for monitoring the instrument parameters.

The contribution by SCISYS to the MERLIN mission includes the hardware and software elements, as well as the central functions of the Payload Operations Centre. This includes important interfaces to the overall satellite ground segment of the joint satellite mission. The concept developed by SCISYS enables a fully automatic flow control that also allows intervention by an operator at any time.

The mission data captured will be received and pre-processed in the Control Ground Segment (CGS), operated by the French space agency CNES in Toulouse. Within the Payload Data Processing (PLDP) facility, the data will be processed into scientific data products and distributed to the science community.

For instrument monitoring and data quality evaluation, these products will be stored in dedicated German mission data storage. SCISYS will specify the final design of this data storage and has the responsibility for its development, testing and verification.

About MERLIN

Starting in 2021, the French-German climate mission MERLIN (Methane Remote Sensing LIDAR Mission) will observe greenhouse gas methane levels in the Earth’s atmosphere. The main goal of this three-year mission is to produce a global methane-concentration map. The German activities are funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and are coordinated by the aerospace management of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The MERLIN ground segment will also be realised with French-German cooperation. The main contractor for the German contribution is Airbus DS GmbH. It will implement the German parts of the MERLIN ground segment in cooperation with SCISYS Deutschland GmbH, the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (DLR-IPA) and the Remote Sensing Technology Institute (DLR-IMF).

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(Munich, 31 January 2017) A European consortium coordinated by GAF AG has been selected to implement the research project “Evolution of Copernicus Land Services based on Sentinel data” (ECoLaSS) under the Horizon2020 Space call EO-3-2016. Focusing on Sentinel time series data, the project will explore innovative future Copernicus Land service products of the continental and global Land component and demonstrate pre-operational prototypes thereof.

With GAF (Germany), SIRS (France), Joanneum Research (Austria), the Catholic University of Louvain UCL (Belgium) and the German Aerospace Center DLR-DFD (Germany), the international project team combines expertise of operational service providers and renowned research institutions from four European countries. The consortium and the European Commission (EC) have signed a Grant Agreement with a duration of 36 months, starting January 2017. The project team has conducted a successful Kick-off Meeting on 20 January 2017 in Munich, attended by the project officer from the EC REA (Research Executive Agency), and by key stakeholders from the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG).

The unprecedented volume of freely available optical and radar earth observation data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1/2/3 satellites with high spatial, radiometric and temporal resolution provides an enormous synergistic potential for the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. Based on this, ECoLaSS will develop, test and demonstrate next-generation operational methods, algorithms and prototypes for innovative Copernicus land cover / land use related products, in support of a future pan-European roll-out, and with a potential for global-scale applications.

GAF acts as overall and scientific project coordinator of the ECoLaSS project. Its technical responsibilities comprise the assessment of service evolution requirements in close coordination with the main Copernicus Land stakeholders; prototypic implementation, testing and demonstration of candidate services based on Sentinel time series; as well as benchmarking and selection of most mature services for operational roll-out. Amongst others, GAF will lead the technical implementation of prototypes for incremental updates of the Copernicus High Resolution Layers (HRLs).

About GAF AG

GAF AG is an e-GEOS (Telespazio/ASI) company located in Munich and Neustrelitz, Germany. It is a leading solutions-provider with an international reputation as a skilled supplier of data, products and services in the fields of geo-information, satellite remote sensing, spatial IT and consulting for private and public clients. GAF offers solutions in the sectors of land monitoring, natural resources, water and environment, security, mining and geology, agriculture, forestry and climate change. Since 1985, the company has successfully completed more than 1000 projects worldwide. GAF is one of the most experienced European service providers in the EU/ESA Copernicus programme and covers all thematic domains: Land, Marine, Atmosphere, Climate Change, Emergency Management and Security. For more information, please visit http://www.gaf.de.

To obtain more information, please contact:
GAF AG
Daniela Miller
Arnulfstr.199, 80634 Munich
Tel. +49 89 12 15 28-0. Fax. +49 89 12 15 28-79
info@gaf.de | www.gaf.de

Toulouse, 27/02/2017: Airbus Defence and Space has closed a partnership agreement with Bird.i, a global platform for accessing the world’s best satellite, airborne and drone imagery. Objective of the partnership is to allow real-time on-line visualisation of Airbus Defence and Space freshest Pléiades and SPOT satellite images, and support the development of new applications and services across a wide range of related analytics markets.

Set-up in 2016, Bird.i team has developed a plug-and-play Application Programming Interface (API) for mapping and location-based applications for a variety of needs, ranging from professional to leisure needs. As part of this agreement, Bird.i will have on-line access to One Atlas, the world’s freshest satellite image library developed by Airbus.

Bernhard Brenner, Head of the Intelligence Business Cluster at Airbus Defence and Space, said “Bird.i is proposing an easy way of exploring the earth, and we are very happy to see our high and very high-resolution satellite imagery as a core layer in this. We are glad to help Bird.i entering new markets, where quick access and visualisation of the most recent satellite images will bring tangible benefits to many businesses.”

Bird.i’s founder and CEO Corentin Guillo said, “I am excited to partner with Airbus Defence and Space as one of our leading suppliers. Maximising the exploitation of their global coverage fits Bird.i’s commitment to serve the freshest possible images to its clients for mass consumption of instantaneously accessible ‘image views’. Both companies will collaborate to streamline the overall process of image consumption and Bird.i will strive at opening new markets.”

Media contacts: Fabienne Grazzini / +33 5 62 19 41 19 / fabienne.grazzini@airbus.com

(Munich, 24 February 2017) GAF AG is pleased to announce the award of the “GMES and Africa Support Programme Technical Assistance Team” service contract by the European Commission. The services consist of the provision of support and consulting to the African Union Commission (AUC), which is coordinating the GMES & Africa initiative.

GMES & Africa is a cooperation framework for the development and implementation of Earth observation based services that support sustainable development in Africa. One of the pillars of the cooperation is the European Copernicus programme (formerly GMES), which constitutes a major source of data, information and technological expertise. GMES & Africa will cover the entire African continent and will be guided by African-owned processes in order to serve African needs. The GMES & Africa support project will focus on improving the sustainable management of natural, water, marine and coastal resources through the use of Earth observation technology. This will allow for better and more informed decision making and will assist policy makers. GMES & Africa is to be implemented by a network of African institutions in cooperation with European partners. The African Union Commission has the role of coordinator and facilitator.

Regional consultation meetings are now under way. The first conference has already taken place in Kigali, Rwanda with delegates from the East Africa region including the Indian Ocean Islands. Similar consultation and information meetings are planned for the regions of Western, Northern, Central and South Africa over the next weeks.

The GAF team assists the AUC by providing technical consulting, as well as training and capacity support. The teamleader started his assignment to AUC in Addis Ababa and he will be joined by 2 more long term key experts. They will be supported by specialists and back office resources. The GAF team combines the experience and capacities of three partners. GAF AG, Germany is a European leader in end-to-end services in the field of Earth observation and geo-information, associated applications and technical assistance (TA) services. AHT Group AG, Germany is a leading service company in the domains of water and natural resources management, agriculture and nature conservation. BRL Ingénierie, France has leading experience in the management of coastal, maritime, water and land resources. All the partners have extensive experience of working in Africa.

Dr Stefan Saradeth, GAF Director International Consulting, observes: “GAF looks forward to using its extensive expertise in Earth observation in order to provide benefits to decision makers in Africa. With GAF’s more than 135 person years of accumulated Copernicus/GMES experience and its extensive TA portfolio, we feel confident that we and our team can provide best-in-class consulting services to our partners in Africa”.

The project has been awarded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO), following a competitive bidding process that took into account technical merits as well as price. The project has started in January 2017 and has a duration of 46 months. It has a value of €3.6 million and is funded by the European Union as part of EuropeAid, under Contract Number 380768.


Caption: Group photo of the delegates that attended the GMES & Africa conference in Kigali, Rwanda

About GAF AG

GAF AG is a leading solutions-provider with an international reputation for the skilled provision of data, products and services in the fields of geo-information, spatial IT and consulting for private and public clients. Over the past 30 years, the company has been active in more than 1,000 projects in over 100 countries throughout Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. In addition, GAF is one of the most experienced service providers in the EU/ESA Copernicus Programme. GAF’s direct involvement with Copernicus, formerly GMES, started in 1998, at the same time as the Baveno manifesto was declared. The company is part of the Telespazio Group, which belongs to Leonardo and Thales, two European technology leaders.

To obtain more information, please contact:
GAF AG
Daniela Miller
Arnulfstr.199, 80634 Munich
Tel. +49 89 12 15 28-0
Fax. +49 89 12 15 28-79
info@gaf.de | www.gaf.de

In order to meet internal needs, and after a long period of R&D, Geo4i is pleased to announce the implementation of an image processing tool, into its geospatial platform, in order to produce automatically radar coherence maps.

Now, it is possible, in few clicks, to request the generation of coherence maps at a given time or periodically.

The tool, integrated into the platform, allows you to enter your area of interest, to check the availability of SAR imagery, to select images of interests over a given period of time, to download them and then to launch process. Of course, it is also possible to plan the process on a future period: the system will then generate products when images will be available.

Currently fully operational with Sentinel 1 data from the Copernicus constellation, the processing chain is adaptable, on request, to the Cosmo-SkyMed and TerraSar X constellations.

Applications are many: refugees monitoring, border monitoring, troop movements, detection / evolution of anthropic structures, damage assessment…

Geo4i continues its innovative activities with the implementation of new processing chains to better meet its customers’ needs.

(February 2017) Planet successfully launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit, the largest satellite constellation ever to reach orbit. This is not just a launch (or a world record, for that matter!); for our team this is a major milestone

It is the culmination of a huge effort over the past 5 years. In 2011 we set ourselves the audacious mission of imaging the entire Earth land area every day. We were convinced that armed with such data, humanity would be able to have a significant positive impact on many of the world’s greatest challenges. We calculated that it would take between 100-150 satellites to achieve this, and we started building them. After today’s launch, Planet operates 149 satellites in orbit. We have reached our milestone.

It’s taken a minor Apollo project to get here! Behind the scenes we’ve miniaturized satellites; learned how to manufacture them at scale; constructed the world’s second largest private network of ground stations; custom built an automated mission control system; created a massive data pipeline able to process the vast amount of imagery we collect; and developed a software platform that lets customers, researchers, governments and NGOs access imagery quickly. Each of these has been a significant undertaking in and of itself—and together it represents a major systems engineering project. This is not to mention the non-engineering efforts from raising capital, receiving regulatory licenses, booking launches, and building a base of hundreds of partners that use the data to solve their needs.

Without a doubt, the single largest driver behind this record-breaking success is the unrelenting dedication of the Planet team. We’ve been humbled by them for the last five years and we thank them today.

Next up: getting this data to our customers and to those who need it the most! But for now Planet is having a great start to the year worthy of a little celebration.

Here are some additional facts and figures regarding this launch:

  • The 88 Dove satellites (collectively known as “Flock 3p”) rode aboard a PSLV rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India
  • This leads to two world records: a record for the most satellites ever launched on a single rocket; and a record for the largest private satellite constellation in history, totaling 149 satellites in all
  • This is our 15th launch of Dove satellites and second aboard India’s PSLV. The launch of Flock 3p comes off the successful launch of Flock 2p on the PSLV in June 2016
  • After deployment, all 88 satellites will be autonomously commissioned in batches. We expect Flock 3p to enter normal imaging operations in about three months
  • Each of the Flock 3p satellites—our 13th build—sports a 200 mbps downlink speed and is capable of collecting over 2 million km² per day

Source

Toulouse, 3 March 2017 – Airbus broadens the range of sensors used in its agricultural services, Farmstar and Fodder Production Index, with the Sentinel 2A and Sentinel 3A satellites of the European Copernicus programme. This improves the level of availability and enhances the quality of both services, with farmers reaping the benefits.

Farmstar, launched fifteen years ago, is a precision agricultural service based on remote sensing that provides key agronomic recommendations to more than 18,000 farmers in France for sustainable wheat, barley, triticale and rapeseed crop growing. Sentinel 2A ihas been operationally used since December 2016, whilesupplementing the SPOT and DMC constellation satellites and helping to elaborate recommendations which are issued throughout the growing season. Sentinel 2A will very shortly be joined by its twin, Sentinel 2B, thus doubling the acquisition capacity of the Sentinel 2 system and significantly improving the reliability of the Farmstar service.

The Airbus Fodder Production Index for pasture insurance is based on imagery acquired by the MODIS satellite every ten days. It enables agricultural insurers to monitor the status of grass growing throughout France and trigger the payment of compensation to livestock breeders. This can be done without having to resort to a visit by an expert in the event of a shortfall in grass production as a result of climatic hazards. Production of the index entails covering vast areas of land rapidly and on a regular basis. Starting January 2017, the MODIS data will gradually be replaced by data from the Sentinel 3A satellite, which offers images with richer spectral information. They guarantee regular acquisitions, while enhancing the quality of the vegetation maps produced to quantify variations in the annual production of pasture biomass.

Agriculture is the ideal market for satellite observation. It is a demanding field which requires monitoring at a pace dictated by the crop cycle. Both of these services proposed by Airbus rely on various satellites owned and operated by Airbus, as well as partner constellations. Thereby, a reliable and pertinent response can be provided to meet each need, maximising the chances of obtaining the right image at the right time, despite any cloud cover which could compromise imaging at the ideal moment in the crop development cycle.