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GAF AG is pleased to announce the successful system extension and training of more than twenty province officers. Hence provincial administrations can manage licenses for exploration and mining of common minerals through real time on-line access to the central repository of the Computerised Mining Cadastre System (CMCS).

The management of mineral resources and respective licenses is assigned to the Mineral Resources Authority of Mongolia (MRAM). A Computerized Mining Cadastre System (CMCS) was developed and implemented by GAF in 2010 with funding from the World Bank. With the adaptation of the new Law on Common Minerals in 2014, the existing system now got extended to enable the provincial administrations (Aimag) to manage applications and licenses through a modern, web-based, and GIS-enabled information system. The system is directly connected with the central data repository at MRAM headquarters in Ulaanbaatar.

The use of this system avoids problems of applications and licenses overlapping with areas restricted from mineral titling or with previously granted licenses. Processing of applications strictly follows the regulations and workflows stipulated by the law. This includes real-time communication between provincial administrations and the central government and consequently speeds-up the effective coordination between provincial administrations and the central government (MRAM). The system extension and associated training was realised with funding from the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Resources (BGR).

GAF has 20 years of world-wide experience in the institutional and technical establishment and reorganisation of mining cadastre authorities. This includes the provision of associated consultancy services and customised software solutions. The CMCS-online for Mongolia is based on GAF’s electronic Mining Cadastre framework eMC+.

About eMC+
eMC+ is GAF’s framework of choice for providing mining cadastre authorities worldwide with a complete package of administrative services in the management of mineral titles. The software platform is web-based and its responsive design supports a wide variety of devices, including mobile appliances. It is based on FOSS (free and open-source software), which ensures that no additional costs are incurred for third party licenses and associated maintenance. Thus, the total cost of ownership is fully transparent and there is no vendor lock-in.

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(Houston, TX, USA, 08 Feb 2016) Fugro and technology partner Areté Associates have successfully delivered near real-time, synoptic, surface current data to characterise Loop Current and Loop Current eddy conditions in the US Gulf of Mexico during a period of intense current conditions.

The new ROCIS (Remote Ocean Current Imaging System) was deployed on its first operational project, in the US Gulf of Mexico. Over the course of the five-month programme, Fugro surveyed currents over a distance of more than 125,000 kilometres – the equivalent of 3 times around the world.

ROCIS is the first commercially available system of its kind and represents a step change in technology for mapping surface current conditions over a wide area of ocean for current sensitive offshore operations. Optimising recent advances in remote sensing and aerial survey, Fugro and Areté Associates developed a system that uses a combination of digital camera technology and highly accurate positioning systems, together with advanced algorithms, to derive surface currents from wave spectra measurements. It can be installed on a suitable survey aircraft, together with an inertial navigation system augmented by Fugro’s Starfix® satellite positioning system.

Current data are reviewed in real-time on board the aircraft, providing continuous assessment of data quality and the location of strong currents. Within an hour of the aircraft landing the system produces a “quick-look” map of the currents over the area while processed data files are available a few hours later. During the programme ROCIS data supported day-to-day operational planning and enhanced the accuracy of 3D hydrodynamic current forecast modelling.

The key technical benefits of ROCIS are the near synoptic, wide area, high resolution, high integrity surface current measurements that allow sub-mesoscale circulation to be measured and monitored. During a four-hour flight the system can survey ocean currents at 250-metre intervals over a track of 900-1,100 kilometres. To map currents over a similar distance using traditional methods would take a combination of four vessels 24 hours. Given sufficient daylight hours, two ROCIS flight missions can be conducted each day.

ROCIS services can be provided to single or multiple clients to monitor offshore current conditions over specific locations or a broad area. The system can also provide support in emergency situations such as oil spill and search and rescue, as well as in oceanographic research programmes.

Fugro and Areté Associates are working on further development of the ROCIS system and services, including the use of expendable probes and the incorporation of additional airborne sensors. In 2016 Fugro will add a second ROCIS unit to further enhance its support of offshore operations.

ROCIS is showcased amongst Fugro’s innovations in the 2016 #AskFugro programme: www.fugro.com/ask

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DHI GRAS had the pleasure to welcome the Director General of European Space Agency (ESA), Jan Woerner and his delegation accompanied by delegates from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation.

During the visit we presented the long and successful relationship we have had with ESA. Earth Observation data is widely used within DHI’s business areas and we used the opportunity to demonstrate examples of our projects using Earth Observation within the domains of water resources, sustainable development and environmental impact assessment. With the launch of the Sentinel satellites, ESA satellite data is becoming increasingly useful within our business areas.

The visit also gave us the opportunity to appreciate the work ESA has been doing in developing the market for Earth Observation services through various initiatives which we have actively taken part in over the past 10 years.

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Deimos Space UK is among the presenters at the ESA 2016 conference on Big Data from Space (BiDS’16). Jose J. Ramos will be speaking about how to save money and increase performance deploying big EO data systems on the cloud using technology developed in the ENTICE Horizon 2020 project (http://www.entice-project.eu).

ENTICE “dEcentralised repositories for traNsparent and efficienT vIrtual maChine opErations”aims to decrease the delivery and deployment times of large virtual machine images using a federated Cloud infrastructures made by novel virtual machine (VM) repository and operational environment named ENTICE. On this project Elecnor Deimos research focuses in the development of future internet technologies to improve Earth observation services.

ENTICE has brought together a collection of three commercial use cases in the realms of energy management, cloud orchestration and big data. Companies dealing with Earth observation data, Cloud service providers and multi Cloud ecosystems will be able to optimize Virtual Machine (VM) images to effectively use Cloud resources and virtualised environments for their computing and data processing needs, trying to overcome the issues they had before:

● Manual, error-prone and time consuming VM image creation
● Monolithic VM images with large deployment and migration overheads
● Proprietary un-optimised VM repositories
● Inelastic resource provisioning
● Lack of information to support effective VM image optimization

In the Earth observation industry, processing and distribution of big space data still presents a critical challenge: the treatment of massive and large-sized data obtained from EO satellite recordings. Remote sensing industries implement conventional on-site infrastructures to acquire, store, process and distribute the generated geo-information. However these solutions do not cover sudden changes in the demand of services and the access to the information presents large latencies.

Elecnor Deimos will improve the following Earth Observation services and highly reduce the costs associated with on premises deployments:

● Acquisition of raw data: when the imagery data is ingested from the satellite into the ground station, the system is notified and the ingestion component automatically ingests the raw data into the cloud for processing.

● Processing of the raw data: once the data is ingested, it is processed in the product processors. There are several processing levels.

● Archiving and cataloguing geo-images: the different products obtained from the processing of raw data are archived and catalogued in order to provide these images to end users or to provide high-added value services.

● Offering user services: this is the front-end of the system. It allows end users to select which product they want to visualize or to download.

By using ENTICE environment, it is expected to highly decrease the delivery time of the satellite imagery to end users and therefore to improve their accessibility, increasing the competitiveness of the EO industries. It will be possible thanks to the ENTICE environment, which will drastically reduce the required time for the creation and the deployment of the VMs. This will allow to support high demanding changes adjusting the infrastructure to serve these overloads, taking advantage of the flexibility and lower time provided by the ENTICE environment.

SOURCE: Innovate UK & ENTICE & Elecnor Deimos
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08-Apr-2016 London, by SoilEssentials Ltd. The leading, award-winning, Scottish precision ag specialists based at Hilton of Fern, near Brechin in Angus have chosen Cereals 2016 to launch the new version of their product – EssentialsMap. First launched in 2012, EssentialsMap is an intuitive online farm mapping system allowing customers to manage spatial farm data such as soil sampling, yield mapping and variable rate map production. The new version takes advantage of the wider availability and lower cost of Earth Observation (EO) data to develop this effective online tool.

The brand new cloud-based version takes the user into a unique online environment giving unparalleled data retrieval capability and access to imagery. The EssentialsMap development was co-funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) in an integrated applications R&D project named KORE (Knowledge, Observation, Response, Evaluation) and sees several complementary services integrated into a unified farm management solution. EssentialsMap is the first cloud-based farm management system to be integrated with Trimble‘s Connected Farm which allows variable rate application maps to be sent directly to the user’s Trimble console without using a USB stick. SoilEssentials are delighted to have collaborated with ESA alongside satellite data processing experts- Deimos Space UK Ltd and drone solutions company – G2Way.

The KORE project developed a platform to combine EO imagery from a variety of sources including ESA’s new Sentinel series of satellites, UAV imagery and tractor-mounted sensors to guarantee the availability of remote-sensed data, regardless of weather and cloud conditions. This remote-sensed imagery is captured at a range of scales from centimetre level from UAV’s, 1 to 20 metre for Satellite imagery and tramline width for tractor-mounted sensors. The appropriate EO data is retrieved specifically for the agriculture industry and opens up a new dimension for agronomists and farming companies to increase their land knowledge and offer a unique service to their clients through the EssentialsMap product. Challenging projects like these continually push the boundaries in this fast-moving industry and SoilEssentials stand at the front of the queue to get involved and progress. Managing Director of SoilEssentials, Jim Wilson explains, “Our aim with the KORE project and the new version of EssentialsMap was to create a unique white box web platform for agronomists to rebrand and tailor to their, and their customers’ own needs. We also wanted to dramatically improve the reliability and usability of remote-sensed imagery and we have achieved that with the seamless integration of multiple providers of satellite imagery, UAV images and tractor mounted sensors.”

Michael Lawrence, Business Development Director of Deimos Space UK Ltd tells us “Our experience in managing and processing large volumes of EO data has enabled us to combine EO data and UAV data to feed the analytic tools in the new version of EssentialsMap.”

“By using micro unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) to produce timely high resolution earth surface imagery we support users that require images to observe the key stages of the crop growth cycle,” says Keith Geary, founder of G2Way, “and on the occasions where there are feasibility issues regarding satellite acquisitions due to cloud cover, existing users of EO can also be supported through this avenue.”

Visitors can find SoilEssentials on stand 321 where they will be delighted to talk to you and where you have the opportunity to preview this exciting new farm management solution.

The SoilEssentials expertise lies where technology and good farming practice merge, providing practical solutions designed primarily with agricultural efficiency in mind. With an extensive product and service portfolio, SoilEssentials complement this with their status as authorised Trimble dealer for Northern UK.

About Elecnor Deimos UK branch:

Deimos Space UK Ltd, based in Harwell, near Oxford, has extensive experience in design, engineering and systems integration in the aerospace, satellite systems, remote sensing, information systems and telecommunications network sectors and is involved in the majority of ESA programmes including exploration, Earth observation, satellite navigation, launchers and human space flight.

About G2Way:

G2Way Ltd is a geospatial technology company based in Nottingham and was created to develop global two-way communications and navigation.

About European Space Agency:

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.

Source: Cereals Event & KORE ESA co-funded project & Elecnor Deimos UK
For further information regarding Elecnor Deimos UK Earth observation applications contact Michael Lawrence, Business Development Director e-mail: michael.lawrence@deimos-space.com

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The two major challenges covering all of these themes are the preservation of environmental resources and ecosystems, and universal access to water (mainly for drinking) and sanitation. In this context, CNES has been commissioned to support the development of satellite applications and services in the field of water, in particular.

These products and services will rely on all satellite missions that generate relevant data on water. This currently includes Sentinel-1,2,3 Pleiades and Meghtropiques. For the future, the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) mission is awaited with great interest. SWOT will enable global coverage of inland waters and provide spatio-temporal variations in the water height of rivers and lakes. In the meantime, the Sentinel-3 altimeter will provide measurements on inland waters that are more accurate than those of most previous altimetry missions.Sentinel-3, with its SRAL instrument, will enable more precise characterization, and will complement the JASON missions while awaiting the global coverage to be provided by the forthcoming SWOT mission. The Sentinel-3 altimeter is now highly anticipated for the study and management of inland waters. Its data will be integrated in the Copernicus Global Land Services platform, which will offer free, open, online access to hydrological data acquired from space. CLS, alongside CNES, LEGOS, CESBIO and many other partners, is working to optimize the acquisition, processing, distribution and exploitation of these hydrological data.

Thanks to Sentinel-3, the other satellite missions we use and our expertise in altimetry (measuring the height of water), when flooding occurs, we are able, for instance, to monitor the water level in order to anticipate flooding of infrastructure located further downstream. This is what we did for one of our customers. A major flood of the Benoué River had serious consequences for local populations and infrastructure. Our customer, who had infrastructures in the Niger Delta, wanted to know whether the flood was over and whether it could return to its plants without putting its employees in danger. The satellite altimetry data we analyzed showed that most of the water located upstream had already flowed downstream, and that the floodwaters were in the process of receding. This information was vital to our customer for managing the site. With Sentinel-3, we will be able to perform this kind of monitoring on smaller tributaries and area not yet covered.

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How can we monitor the effects of global warming, optimize management of our freshwater resources, help traditional local fishermen exploit marine resources in a sustainable way, and ensure a safe route for skippers in solo round-the-world races?

The data from the European Sentinel-3 satellite, combined with the know-how of the scientific teams at CLS, a subsidiary of CNES, and of its customers or users, will address these issues from space.

Designed to monitor the Earth and oceans, Sentinel-3, part of the Copernicus program, was developed jointly by ESA and the European Commission. This program is the European response to ever-increasing needs for environmental stewardship. Sentinel-3 is one of a
family of several satellites, each using a different technique or having a different goal (Sentinel-1 is carrying a synthetic aperture radar; Sentinel-2 is dedicated to optical imaging and Sentinel-3 will focus on the oceans).

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(Tuesday, 12 April 2016) Mr Luigi Pasquali (CEO of Telespazio) will partecipate at “Fighting climate change: Sharing Italy’s innovative Technologies”

Pasquali will present Finmeccanica and e-GEOS satellite capabilties and practical examples of how Italian technologies seek to address and prevent the effects of climate change.

The goal of these technologies is to:

  • Protect islands and coastlines from the rising levels of the seas and oceans;
  • Use satellite imagery to track and monitor the impact of climate change (desertification, floods, pollution, rising sea levels, natural catastrophes, melting of glaciers);
  • Protect and monitor marine areas through the use of robotic fish schools;
  • Produce energy from clean and renewable sources (solar and marine), so as to no longer depend on polluting energy sources;
  • Monitor sea levels to prevent flooding and inundations.

View the program and concept note of the conference.

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e-GEOS S.p.A. announces to have granted Beijing Vastitude Technology Co. Ltd., from January 1 2016 to December 31 2017, the exclusive right to sell and distribute COSMO-SkyMed Products within the national borders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Hong Kong and Macao regions included.

MicroCarb will map global carbon dioxide levels and monitor global warming

CNES, the French Space Agency, has awarded Airbus Defence and Space, the world’s second largest space company, a contract to design and build the optical instrument for MicroCarb, a microsatellite to map global carbon dioxide levels. After launch in 2020, the satellite will study carbon dioxide sources (which produce CO2) and sinks (which absorb it) to understand how this greenhouse gas is affecting climate change.

“When it comes to understanding what is happening to our climate here on Earth, we need the latest technology to give us reliable and accurate data,” said François Auque, Head of Space Systems. “This is where MicroCarb comes in, a next-generation instrument which will help us to finally understand what CO2 is doing to our environment and our climate.”

MicroCarb will be the first European mission dedicated solely to measuring CO2 levels using a spectrometer scanning at visible and near infra-red wavelengths. The instrument is so accurate it can measure CO2 levels accurately to within one part in a million. This mission complements Merlin, which measures methane levels by LIDAR, an instrument that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser light, which Airbus Defence and Space is also designing and building for CNES and the German Aerospace Centre DLR.

MicroCarb is a priority to understand and monitor climate change. The programme launch was announced at COP21 in Paris in December 2015. Airbus Defence and Space will lead the manufacture of the optical instrument at its Toulouse site, with a large contribution from French SMEs.

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