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CGG Multi-Physics is pleased to announce that its Helitem helicopter time-domain electromagnetic system has successfully acquired high-quality, broad-spectrum Airborne Electromagnetic (AEM) data at a base frequency of 7.5 Hz. This is a significant breakthrough for resource exploration worldwide, and an industry first.

_Comparison of 30 Hz Helitem resistivity data and 7.5 Hz Helitem resistivity data. The circles indicate known targets
at 200m (right) and 400m (left) depth. The 30 Hz data does not image the deeper target while the 7.5 Hz data does._

As shallow mineral resources are depleted, and mining activity moves to ever greater depths, mineral explorers are searching deeper and in more difficult-to-image environments, such as beneath conductive cover sequences. The ability to effectively energize deep conductive targets and survey at lower frequencies is critical to improving the imaging performance of airborne electromagnetic systems in these environments. Until now, these capabilities have been beyond the reach of AEM systems.

The key to this major advance has been CGG’s continued investment to improve its AEM receiver design. Historically, receiver motion-induced noise has been the primary limiting factor in acquiring useful low base frequency AEM data. Evolutions in the design of CGG’s Helitem AEM system in terms of both receiver electronics and a patented receiver suspension system now allow operation at a base frequency of 7.5 Hz. An innovative change in transmitter pulse-shape also enables early off-time measurement and effective energizing of deep conductive targets.​​

CGG’s Helitem AEM system can now image the Earth’s resistivity to greater depths than other systems while retaining resolving power throughout the section. A comparison of resistivity images from CGG’s 30 Hz and 7.5 Hz Helitem systems shows that the 7.5 Hz data provides more interpretable information about the near-surface and also delivers accurate geological information at depth.

Greg Paleolog, SVP, Multi-Physics, CGG, said: “This significant breakthrough puts Helitem in a league of its own as the most advanced helicopter electromagnetic technology for exploring conductive targets at great depth. This unique capability makes Helitem the premier AEM technology for explorers requiring deeper and clearer imaging of new orebodies.”

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Airborne Technologies is proud to have obtained FIKI certification from EASA for the Vulcanair P68R.The aircraft type is thus approved for “Flights Into Known Icing” conditions.

Handover FIKI STC at the AERO in Friedrichshafen from left to right: Thorwald Buck (EASA ECS Expert), Wilhelm Jagritsch (ACG – Head of Airworthiness and Certification), Burkhard Jäger (Airborne Technologies – Head of Design Organisation), Trevor Woods (EASA – Certification Director), Wolfgang Grumeth (Airborne Technologies – CEO)

The complex modification of the basic aircraft with all redundant systems included a test flight programme with dry ice shapes, as well as natural ice flights in northern Scotland, to prove the de-ice capacity under most adverse conditions. All modifications for the special mission equipment such as EO/IR gimbal and the whole array of antennas for tactical radio and down/up-link, are covered by this STC as well. With this FIKI capability for a 2t-class aircraft, Airborne Technologies sets new standards with regard to dispatch reliability and safety of the customers.

Wolfgang Grumeth, CEO of Airborne Technologies, says: “The integration of special equipment into the different platforms goes meanwhile far beyond the simple installation of sensors. The complexity of systems and customer requirements makes it increasingly necessary to intervene in all areas. We are taking over more and more modifications previously assigned to OEMs. Besides FIKI we have recently certified TCAS II and P-RNAV/SBAS.

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Planet is expanding its engagement in Europe in a big way. Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Airbus, a leader in remote sensing, to enable access to each other’s data and joint cooperation on the development of new geospatial solutions.

François Lombard, Director of the Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space (left); Dirk Hoke, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space (center); and Will Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Planet (right) at the signing of the agreement at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France.

As part of the agreement, Planet and Airbus aim to provide customers with a comprehensive suite of global remote sensing data at multiple temporal and spatial resolutions, and to collaborate on new analytic solutions for a range of commercial markets.

Airbus and Planet are truly complementary partners in the sense that Airbus provides reliable, high-resolution remote sensing capabilities, and Planet brings its unique global coverage and temporal cadence, as well as rapid iteration. Together, both partners will be able to deliver new and sophisticated offerings to fit customer needs globally across markets.

“By combining our strengths, we will provide a key capability to address all market needs, both in terms of data and value-added products, and to best serve our clients, whatever their industry and their requirements” said François Lombard, Director of the Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space.

Airbus’s constellation is comprised of very high-resolution Pléiades 1A and 1B; the high-resolution SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 satellites and the DMC constellation. On the radar side, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, and the PAZ radar satellites ensure customers have access to any location whatever the cloud coverage. Planet operates the largest constellation of satellites in history, offering daily, global 3-5 meter resolution imagery via its over 130 PlanetScope satellites and sub-daily, sub-1 meter resolution imagery of anywhere on Earth with its constellation of 13 SkySats.

Looking ahead, Airbus and Planet can maximize their global presence in key verticals, while leveraging each other’s expertise to bring more comprehensive and advanced geospatial products to market. This partnership spans generations of aerospace innovation and reaches across borders, and Planet is looking forward to a bright future partnering with Airbus.

“Source:“https://www.planet.com/pulse/airbus-partnership-geospatial-solutions/

After 32 years of working for GAF and more than 11 years in the position of CEO, Peter Volk stepped down from the latter position as planned on 30 June 2018. On 1 July, Sebastian Carl took over as CEO of GAF.

J.M. Gardin (Deputy CEO Telespazio and CEO Telespazio France), J. Cuscianna (Head of HR Telespazio), S. Carl (CEO GAF AG), L. Pasquali (CEO Telespazio), M. Comparini (CEO e-GEOS)

Sebastian Carl has been with the company for more than 25 years and previously already managed large parts of the companies’ activities. With an educational background as an agricultural engineer, he gained a doctorate in SAR imagery analysis using artificial analysis. Among other things, he has worked with the analysis of large volumes of EO data at GAF.

Peter Volk will remain available to the company in order to ensure a smooth transition and assistance with strategic and operative functions. GAF is very pleased that it can provide management continuity and therefore ongoing excellent service to its existing and future clients.

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Earth-i was recently named the number one “new space” company in Europe; quite an achievement for a company only 3 years old.

Earth-i was set up as a major distributer of the DMC3/TripleSat Constellation data. Since then, Earth-i has added several constellations to their fleet of Earth Observation satellites, including their very own service demonstrator satellite, VividX2. The VividX2 service demonstrator satellite launched in January 2018, just 7 months after Earth-i announced their plans to launch the first Earth observation constellation of satellites to offer very high-resolution, full-colour video and still imagery. It’s been a busy time at Earth-i HQ in Guildford.

As Earth-i’s success story continues to proliferate through industry and government, they’ve been flying the flag for the UK space sector.

Firstly, Earth-i was selected by ESA’s Earth Observation programme team to record an address for the next Member States meeting in early 2019. Richard Blain, CEO, discussed ESA’s need to shake up how they work with commercial organisation and small businesses and continue positive initiatives such as EO Open Data Science and Phi Lab.

Last week, Earth-i was also delighted to host Member of Parliament for Guildford, Anne Milton, at their head office on the University of Surrey Research Park, joined by Sarah Parker, MD of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. The meeting was an opportunity for Anne to learn more about the growing Space Cluster on the Surrey Research Park, as well how each organisation is supporting the next generation of space sector employees.

By working together, the UK space sector is aiming to capture 10% of the global space market by 2030, worth an estimated £40 billion annually to the UK economy. According the latest figures, the sector is making excellent progress towards this goal by already securing a £14bn turnover, and growth of 71% by 2010.

Richard Blain recently sat down with Geospatial world to discuss openly how the UK and Europe are creating prime environments for new small businesses and start-ups in the space sector. Watch Richard’s interview with GeoSpatial world by visiting: “https://www.geospatialworld.net/videos/uk-has-a-conducive-environment-for-space-start-ups/”: https://www.geospatialworld.net/videos/uk-has-a-conducive-environment-for-space-start-ups/

Earth-i is a global business, working with clients across world, and the Guildford location is where Earth-i chose to center their HQ to take advantage of the space cluster and the world-leading expertise in space technology and innovation close at hand. UK Government departments have set up a very supportive environment and regularly find ourselves collaborating with new partners from across the space sector, as well as non-traditional ‘space data’ users, such as our new product development initiative with commodity market data specialists Marex Spectron.

As the company grows, there are new and exciting careers opportunities within the technology and product development team. Would you like to join the fastest growing sector in the UK? Take a look at our career pages to see our current opportunities.

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Deimos Imaging’s parent company, UrtheCast, announced on May 19th the signature of a credit agreement for US$142 Million to finance the construction, launch and deployment of the UrtheDaily™ Constellation. This important milestone brings the implementation of UrtheDaily™ one step closer.

UrtheDaily™ is a satellite constellation designed to acquire the whole Earth’s landmass, excluding Antarctica, every day at 10:30 am, with high-quality multispectral imagery at 5m resolution. It will facilitate geo-analytics at scale, achieving highly cost-effective, daily, global coverage, delivering scientific-grade quality data.

The mission has been developed with and for Deimos Imaging’s customers, including Land O ‘Lakes, who became anchor customers in February 2017. One of the main markets for UrtheDaily™ is Precision Agriculture by providing the foundational products to significantly accelerate decision making and optimize production, benefiting end users worldwide. The delivery of multi-band, spectral diverse data on a daily basis, will offer the opportunity to develop unique and responsive value-added applications, previously not possible for key markets such as Agriculture.

Deimos Imaging is leveraging over a decade of experience and unique expertise in supporting agriculture applications with their legacy Deimos-1 and Deimos-2 missions. They are currently improving this capability by launching the ‘UrtheDaily precursor service’, which is based on diversified multi-satellite imagery, bringing together various Earth Observation assets that result in increased observation frequency and coverage. The availability of the ‘UrtheDaily precursor service’ now, supports Deimos Imaging’s customer base and is expected to evolve successfully leading them to UrtheDaily™.

The spectral bands of the UrtheDaily™ Constellation are specifically selected to match bands of other missions (including Sentinel-2), to enable constant and automatic in-flight cross-calibration with trusted references, minimizing the atmospheric effects, and to provide improved accuracy. Therefore, any user worldwide could seamlessly integrate UrtheDaily™ into their critical workflows, accelerating reliable analytics.

Other markets that will benefit from the global coverage, daily revisit and geo-analytics ready imagery provided by UrtheDaily™, include Maritime Surveillance, Land Administration and Mapping, Emergency and Disaster Management, Forestry and Environment, Oil and Gas and Defence and Security. The products will be available directly onto users’ desktop in Near Real Time.

The European Union (EU) faces many challenges economically, socially, and environmentally. Location intelligence is a key element when it comes to making better decisions and formulating policy to create a stronger, more united, and connected digital Europe.

Program description

During this event, you will have the opportunity to share experiences and get inspired with best practices in applying GIS to a number of EU policies. We will do this through a series of policy-oriented plenary presentations on the 7th of November and more technical-oriented sessions on the 8th of November.

Register Now

We invite you to attend this free and invitation-only event. Please register to secure your seat and save the dates in your schedule. We will come back to you soon with more details on the speakers and the agenda.

The Arctic is a huge and remote place where physical conditions are extremely challenging. This has always affected field campaigns in terms of health and safety issues and with huge associated costs. Consequently, there is still a big lack of detailed up-to-date maps of the arctic coastal zone which significantly affects the navigational safety in the area. With the increased activity level in the region due to opening of the ice waters, increased tourism, exploration for natural resources etc., this is a big cause for concern for both human lives and potential environmental disasters from groundings. At DHI GRAS, we are working on minimising these risks. With modern satellites and advanced physical modeling of the water column, it is possible to derive reliable water depths in shallow waters at low costs with no risks associated.

map illustration of the resulting bathymetry dataset

DHI GRAS is a leading global provider of satellite derived bathymetry based on our sensor-independent state-of-the-art physically-based models. Together with our local partners in Greenland, our satellite derived bathymetry expert, @Mikkel Lydholm Rasmussen and I have just completed a validation campaign in Greenland. Through collection of multibeam echo sounder data, it was clearly demonstrated that our satellite derived bathymetry product performs very well also in Arctic waters.

With the abundance of satellite image data sources, such as Sentinel 2 and other commercial data sources such as DigitalGlobe satellites, we are now ready to start large scale production of shallow water bathymetry in Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic region.

Let us know if you are interested in validation results and the satellite derived bathymetry dataset; RLB@dhigroup.com.

See video:https://youtu.be/vaetuRfyeGY

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AIRBUS excited to announce that the One Tasking service has now been extended to our Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites. With the launch of OnePlan for TerraSAR-X, AIRBUS is strengthening their multi-sensor offer, giving us the opportunity to simply select the best sensor for our projects and to obtain the imagery you requested exactly when you need it!

One Tasking is Airbus’ satellite tasking service, making satellite commissioning risk free, fast and incredibly easy – with an unrivalled commitment to provide our customers with relevant and timely results.

The availability of OnePlan for TerraSAR-X will support customers who require high-quality and precise radar data in many situations – regardless of the weather and daylight conditions: from extensive maritime coverage to environmental mapping, not to mention image interpretation thanks to TerraSAR-X’s unique high resolution.

The launch of OnePlan for TerraSAR-X is a first step of a complete integration of radar into Airbus’ One Tasking offer! Our commitment to providing useful and timely answers for our customers has inspired our decision to further expand One Tasking offer to our radar satellite constellation, thus offering infinite opportunities to combine the sensors and even more possibilities to solve your challenges.

Please visit TerraSAR-X and One Tasking web pages for more information or contact us at Intelligence-services@airbus.com.

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VDL ETG Projects, part of VDL Groep, will build the support structure for the main mirror of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) of ESO (European Southern Observatory) in northern Chile. The design was realised together with TNO, supported by NOVA (Netherlands Research School for Astronomy). The support structure consists of 798 supports for mirror segments, which together form the main mirror (with a diameter of more than 39 meters) of the telescope. This order, which will be delivered over a period of about five years, is worth tens of millions of euros. This represents a special achievement by Dutch industry.

Kees Buijsrogge, TNO Director of Space and Scientific Instrumentation: “TNO’s ambition is to develop innovative space and scientific instruments and systems together with industry, users and other knowledge institutes. To this end we use our experience in the field of optical instrumentation and precision mechanics for the aerospace, astronomy and semiconductor industry for the design and testing of structures that have to be positioned on a nanometre scale (one millionth of a millimetre). We are therefore proud to have contributed to this very attractive assignment for Dutch industry.”

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