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WASHINGTON — Planet has won a second contract to provide satellite imagery to the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), beating out contenders UrtheCast, Orbital Insight and Sky Hawk Drone Services.

The one-year, $14 million contract follows a seven-month, $20 million pilot contract that began in September to assess ways San Francisco-based Planet’s “persistence and global coverage capabilities could most effectively support the NGA mission,” according to a July 19 agency statement.

NGA said none of the other companies it considered could offer an imagery subscription service with a high enough revisit rate on a global basis. NGA said the agency requires the ability to monitor changes across large geographic areas for humanitarian and intelligence missions.

“Monitoring sources that collect imagery at medium resolution (3-7 meters) at a cadence of weekly or better can satisfy the requirements of making assessments of certain [redacted] intelligence problems, including food security forecasting, [redacted] installation or infrastructure development, military preparedness [redacted] economic forecasting by measuring inventories, and other observations that can be made from analyzing changes over time. In addition, medium resolution monitoring sources improves NGA’s ability to maintain current shoreline data and assess whether foundation products require updating,” the agency said in an unclassified document released July 20.

Planet’s constellation of remote-sensing cubesats, called Doves, is currently the largest constellation in orbit. The NGA document described the constellation as 160 satellites with 120 active, but Planet spokesperson Trevor Hammond told SpaceNews July 20 that the operator’s current fleet numbers 190 satellites, 142 of which are actively imaging; the remaining 48 are still being integrated into the fleet after launching on a Soyuz rocket last week. Dove cubesats have an average resolution of 3.7 meters. The Planet fleet also includes seven larger SkySat satellites from its acquisition of Terra Bella and five RapidEye satellites from BlackBridge.

Planet has 23 operational ground stations to communicate with its constellation and receive collected imagery. A ground station completed in northern Canada earlier this year is facing protracted licensing delays, prompting the company to look elsewhere for other sites while awaiting an outcome.

Of Planet’s competitors for the NGA contract, only Vancouver-based UrtheCast is a satellite operator, and the company’s first UrtheDaily satellites won’t be in orbit until early 2019. The company currently leverages cameras on the International Space Station and two free-flyers gained through the acquisition of Elecnor Deimos in 2015.

NGA said that Orbital Insight, not being a satellite operator, was inherently “incapable of satisfying the requirement.” Hanover, Maryland-based Sky Hawk Drone Services provides imagery only for domestic monitoring activities, the agency said.

NGA said the second Planet contract gives the Defense Department and the Intelligence Community imagery from 25 regions of interest that include the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

“Our second contract with Planet demonstrates NGA’s continued pursuit of commercial [geospatial intelligence] GEOINT where it has demonstrated mission utility,” John Charles, NGA’s senior GEOINT authority for commercial imagery, said in a July 19 statement. “At the same time that Planet has continued to mature their capability to where they can now offer weekly global coverage, NGA and our many customers have been learning how to use it across our varied mission sets in numerous locations so we truly understand where we get the bang for our buck. Those lessons learned are reflected in the structure of this new contract.”

NGA’s mainstay imagery and geospatial solutions provider DigitalGlobe said at the time of the first Planet NGA contract that it had expected the agency to experiment with new small satellite resources.

“We see no impact whatsoever on our relationship with the NGA,” DigitalGlobe Chief Executive Jeffrey Tarr said in October. “Very different use case: We’re foundational and part of the core [NGA] mission.”

Nonetheless, DigitalGlobe is investing in small satellites of its own. Through a joint venture with Saudi Arabia-based Taqnia Space and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), DigitalGlobe is building a constellation of least six small satellites called Scout, with sub-meter resolution imaging capabilities for launch in 2019. The company is also planning a constellation called WorldView Legion starting in 2020 for which it has given few details other than saying it will reach revisit rates of up to 40 times a day. WorldView Legion replaces the WorldView-1, WorldView-2, and GeoEye-1 satellites, and will double the company’s 30-centimeter and multispectral imaging capacity. Space Systems Loral, a satellite manufacturing subsidiary of MDA Corp., which is buying DigitalGlobe, is building those satellites.

In the July 20 document, NGA said it expects more imagery providers like Planet to launch remote-sensing constellations over the next five years. The agency will reassess its commercial options as these new entrants come online “before entering subsequent acquisitions.”

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(© Peter B. de Selding | Sep 17, 2017) PARIS — With satellite fleet operator SES joining its investor team, Seraphim Capital passed the $90-million mark for its Seraphim Space Fund and closed it with the announcement of two initial investments in Spire Global and Iceye Oy.

London-based Seraphim is no longer the outlier it appeared to be in 2015 when it first announced its intentions to use money from well-known space-industry players to finance startups whose technology ultimately would be useful to the industry’s established companies.

At the time, these included hardware builders Airbus and Surrey Satellites, and satellite services provider Telespazio as well as funding from the European Space Agency and Britain’s Satellite Application Catapult.

As Mark Rigolle, a former CFO of SES and now heading funds-seeking startup LeoSat, likes to say: “Anyone who says it’s easy raising money in this sector has never had to do it.” That proved the case for Seraphim, which struggled to meet its goal of closing with 83 million British pounds, or $123 million at 2015 exchange rates.

Since then, Seraphim has rethought its approach, hired former Google Maps, Earth and Local CTO Michael Jones as a managing partner and bided its time as the European markets woke up to the promise of what was going on in the United States.

Airbus has invested in multibillion-dollar startup OneWeb’s global internet constellation and created Airbus Ventures, which invested in IoT startup ELSE/Astrosat; Thales Alenia Space has invested in Spaceflight Industries’ startup BlackSky Earth observation project; and the European Space Agency’s Business Incubation Centers have begun to yield measurable results.

Europe likely will never be as ready to go as all-in on speculative investments as U.S. investors. But the movement is clear, even if many of the investment levels look modest by U.S. standards.

SES is located in Luxembourg, whose leaders’ language often makes them sound like investment-fund managers rather than politicians.

Luxembourg is putting cash into ventures that want to mine celestial bodies for minerals — not because Luxembourg thinks this market is near-term, but because it believes such investment creates a dynamic that will lure near-term talent and capital.

SES Chief Strategy and Development Officer Christophe De Hauwer said the company, which will have a seat on the Seraphim advisory board, invested in the fund as a way to keep an eye on developments of future use to SES.

“We’ve invested in the Seraphim Space Fund and joined the advisory board to further enhance our ability to identify and engage with innovative developments along our existing value chains, as well as with opportunities adjacent to our core markets,” De Hauwer said in a Sept. 14 statement.

Telespazio Chief Executive Luigi Pasquali, whose space services company is investing alongside Thales Alenia Space in BlackSky, said: “Seraphim is one of the most important nodes of the network we are building to keep up with this transformation and to manage innovation.”

Seraphim said Sept. 14 that it had closed its first two investments, in Spire Global of the United States, which has facilities in Scotland and Singapore; and Iceye Oy of Finland.

Spire, which is developing a network of small satellites for meteorological and maritime-tracking, is no longer a startup. It has raised some $70 million in funding rounds since 2013 and already operates a revenue-generating satellite infrastructure.

Lead backers include RRE Ventures, Promus Ventures, Jump Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Given that it’s well past the starting blocs, Spire might seem an odd choice for Seraphim. But fund manager Mark Boggett said he will not turn down a good investment prospect, even if it is well into development.

Iceye plans to begin launching a constellation of small radar satellites — “small” and “radar” do not usually play together — in 2018. Before the Seraphim investment, whose value was not disclosed, Iceye had raised $18.7 million in several funding rounds since 2015.

Iceye’s backers have included the European Union’s Horizon 2020 fund and the Finnish government. Other supporters are Draper Associates, Draper Nexus, True Ventures, Space Angels and Lifeline Ventures, the latter based in Finland.

Seraphim’s stated focus is companies involved in Earth observation, whether from space or the atmosphere. It is about to close on an investment in an unidentified drone company.

“We find ourselves in a privileged position witin the space market,” said ex-Googler, now-Seraphim Managing Partner Jones. “We are seeing the vast majority of investment opportunities in the sector. By virtue of being a specialist space-tech investor — the only dedicated space-focused VC globally — we are benefitting from a strong, global deal flow….

“Furthermore, as a thematic specialist, we’ve been targeted by many other VCs asking us to participate in space-related transactions they’re working on,” Jones said.

Seraphim’s Boggett, who has been spearheading the space-tech fund since it was founded, addressed questions in a Sept. 17 interview.

Is GBP 70 million an optimal closing amount for the fund?

We set out to raise $100m fund and in the final result reached $90m. Raising for a VC fund is challenging, but is doubly so when thematically focused on an emerging sector like New Space. We are happy that we have sufficient capital for the fund but anticipate that Seraphim Capital will continue raising further space-tech-focused funds in the near future.

I thought your focus was Series A-type startup financing where you could have a significant influence. Spire Global is well beyond that stage.

The fund’s investment policy provides flexibility from Seed through to B series and beyond. We just want to invest in the best businesses we can identify.

However, we are focused on A series for the majority of investments as we consider this the optimal stage to participate at the Seraphim Space fund.

We always set out to include a number of B series investments as these help the returns profile for the LPs [limited partners]. They enable earlier returns than the typical 5-7 years of an A series investment.

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(By Kendall Russell | August 30, 2017) Although the global repository of Earth Observation (EO) imagery continues to grow, the means by which developers can turn that data into value are arguably less abundant. To address this demand, young software company SkyWatch has established a new cloud-based system called EarthCache that opens the door for developers to create new applications and products based on remote sensing data.

In an interview with Via Satellite, SkyWatch’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) Dexter Jagula explained that EarthCache targets developers looking for an easier way to access EO data, particularly those who have never leveraged remote sensing data in their respective markets. “That’s where we believe the true innovation and increase in usage will be realized,” Jagula said.

Jagula said he has observed demand ramping up for new applications for agriculture and infrastructure projects in particular. “From the agriculture standpoint, we’re talking about users that are looking to develop vegetation health indexes,” he said. “A prime use case would be allowing farmers to assess the health of their fields.”

On the infrastructure side, developers are seeking new ways to monitor the operational efficiency of projects such as new roads and railways, as well as improve emergency response analysis in rural areas, he added.

As SkyWatch states on its website, the current process for purchasing satellite data can be somewhat lengthy and time-consuming, as commercial satellite operators typically don’t distribute their own data and instead operate through regional and territorial resellers. This paradigm does allow satellite operators to more easily serve localized end-users such as city governments — but according to a 2014 Euroconsult report on data distribution, some end-user sectors, such as defense, prefer to bypass resellers entirely in lieu of shorter delivery times, additional autonomy in satellite tasking, and continuous data supply.

“As you can imagine it’s not a very scalable method. This is just the way the industry has offered the data for the last few decades,” Jagula added.

But there are exceptions. As Jagula pointed out, the industry has started to question the reseller model with the rise of EO juggernauts such as Planet and DigitalGlobe, which have developed their own digital infrastructure through which any of their customers can access their massive data archives. According to Jagula, SkyWatch has followed suit on this trend to recreate this type of infrastructure for the entire industry, but at a lower cost than traditional resellers.

EarthCache comprises both public and commercial data, coalescing datasets from partners such as NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The company is currently in talks with some of the prominent satellite operators to integrate their datasets too, Jagula said, as well as younger NewSpace startups looking to field new constellations.

The biggest draw for commercial companies to link their catalogs with EarthCache is additional visibility for their data. Additionally, SkyWatch offers a means for end users to task satellites on an anonymized basis. “We believe customers of this type of data don’t really care which satellites are being used,” he said. “We make this opportunity completely available and transparent to [satellite operators] so it’s on them to try and fulfill that if they have the capability or capacity on the satellite to do so.”

According to Jagula, SkyWatch plans to work closely with companies across the value chain to potentially funnel customers through the same conduit. Leaf Space, which is developing a ground station network to download more than seven terabytes of satellite data per day, is just one example of the kind of companies SkyWatch has formed a relationship with, Jagula said. Satellite operators who want their data downloaded to Leaf Space’s ground stations could then disseminate that data through SkyWatch’s platform, he explained. “And then tasking opportunities that are sent by users downstream can be sent directly … to Leaf Space’s customers as well,” he said. “You can see how a ground segment company like Leaf Space and SkyWatch go hand-in-hand.”

While companies such as DigitalGlobe and Planet will continue to distribute their data through their own proprietary platforms, Jagula doesn’t necessarily see it as a threat to the SkyWatch business. One reason is because they can still integrate their data in EarthCache if they choose, but also because he sees new companies building their own distribution platforms as “a waste of resources” if they don’t have one already. “In cases where companies are still launching, they can use us as a digital infrastructure exclusively … and save their capital for more important tasks and focus on their core competencies,” he said.

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EUMETSAT, together with ECMWF and Mercator Ocean, will hold an Information Day on the Copernicus Data Information and Access Service on 10 November in Darmstadt, Germany

EUMETSAT, together with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring (CAMS) and Climate Change Monitoring (C3S) Services operated by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and with the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS), operated by Mercator Océan, will hold an information day for European industry, representatives of other Copernicus service providers and future users on their upcoming Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS) platform, at its Darmstadt headquarters on 10 November.

The DIAS platform will be one of the functional elements of the Copernicus Integrated Ground Segment, funded by the EU.

The aim of the information day is to provide attendees with information about how EUMETSAT, ECMWF and Mercator Océan will design their DIAS and to explain its development and its implementation logic.

The targeted audience are entities interested in cooperating with or using the DIAS, i.e. from other Copernicus services, from entities interested in making their data accessible through or processed on the DIAS or from industry.

EUMETSAT will present the planned approach to procurements, including the tentative schedule for the release of invitations to tender after their approval by the EC. They will also provide information on the functionalities foreseen in the DIAS. There will also be ample time for questions and feedback.

For those interested in attending the information day, please click here to register

Registration will close on 31 October 2017.

Attendance will be limited to 200 persons, and confirmation will be sent on a first come, first served basis.

The agenda of the Information Day will follow soon here

Australia’s top science organisation, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation or CSIRO, is to conduct joint research with US-based Radiant.Earth into satellite imagery and earth observation data for promoting disaster resilience and tackling critical issues in health, climate change and sustainable water management, mainly in the Asia-Pacific region.

A recent United Nations Environment Assembly or UNEA report says 41% of all disasters caused by natural hazards over the past two decades have occurred in the Asia-Pacific region.

Scientists say the partnership between Data61, Australia’s leading data innovation group, and Radiant.Earth, an ‘earth imagery platform for impact’, will mean their existing resources, networks and facilities can be used in real-time modelling, machine learning and visualisation technologies. The aim is to give the global community more timely and better evidence-based understanding of global activity and the changes needed to address critical challenges.

Adrian Turner, CSIRO’s Data61 chief executive, said the partnership with Radiant.Earth was an example of how science and technology and cross-border partnerships could deliver benefit to the global community.

Anne Hale Miglarese, Radiant.Earth’s chief executive, said: “The world is awash in Earth observation data, but most of the low- and middle-income countries are still poorly mapped and served by geospatial technologies.

“Partnering with Data61 to drive open remote sensing science will help us serve this community better, including non-profits working in global development, as well as national and regional government entities.”

Data61 was officially formed in 2016 with a mission ‘to create Australia’s data-driven future’. Radiant.Earth was launched in August last year to provide open access to geospatial data, with analytical tools ‘for global development practitioners designed to improve decision-making, and to foster entrepreneurship worldwide’. It aims to be able to ‘illuminate the earth’, allowing everywhere to be ‘seen’.

The UNEA report, Rapidly Growing Middle Class Presents Challenges and Opportunities for the Environment and Health in Asia and the Pacific, says increasing unsustainable consumption patterns have led to worsening air pollution, water scarcity and waste generation and threaten human and environmental health.

“Increased demand for fossil fuels and natural resources – extensive agriculture, palm oil and rubber plantations, aquaculture and the illegal trade in wildlife – are causing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. “The situation is exacerbated by adverse climate change effects and an increasing number of natural disasters, which are causing devastating human and financial losses in the region. Extreme climate events are projected to become the new normal.”

Informing decision-making

Miglarese said one planned activity will include hosting open data on Radiant.Earth’s platform and a demonstration of Data61’s mapping products and tools on that platform to “support mission critical programmes, primarily in the Asia-Pacific region”.

She said Radiant.Earth’s mission was to connect people worldwide to Earth imagery, geospatial data, tools and knowledge to meet the world’s most critical challenges.

Turner said Data61 has “world-leading expertise in applying data visualisation and geospatial tools to inform decision-making around smart cities and infrastructure, including mapping renewable energy systems or demographics in different locations to inform policy decision-making”.
“In addition, with our other technologies we can predict the behaviour and spread of bushfires and have worked with local emergency services organisations and government in Australia to plan for emergencies,” he said.

A combination of approaches, including Radiant.Earth’s extensive network, would be used to improve disaster resilience among disadvantaged communities in the Asia-Pacific region in the coming months, Turner said.

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(by Tereza Pultarova — September 15, 2017). PARIS — Earth-observation startups are investing in data analytics and machine learning to transform raw satellite data into marketable insights they say have the potential to be every bit as indispensable to investors and business leaders as the up-to-the-second analytics they get from the likes of a $20,000-a-year Bloomberg terminal subscription.

Speaking during the closing day of Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week here Sept. 15, top executives of Earth-observation startups Urthecast, Planet and others agreed that the growth of their respective businesses will depend on the ability to use the wealth of raw data acquired by their satellites to extract answers needed by customers across a wide range of industries.

“We believe that there is going to be a unique moment when this industry is going to be similar to what happened, for example, in navigation,” said Wade Larson, president and CEO of Vancouver-based Urthecast. “Navigation became kind of embedded infrastructure in a much larger industry called location-based services. We think that this is happening with geoanalytics, as well.”

Andrew Wild, chief revenue officer at San Francisco-based Planet, said the company is responding to the trend by focusing on customer engagement to understand how they could use their technology to solve practical problems in the new “insights economy.”

“We have a very good capability with satellites but that doesn’t matter if we are not solving business outcomes,” Wild said. “We have transformed our entire company outside in and we are talking with customers. We have deep conversations with all sorts of customers on all sorts of verticals.”

Jason Andrews, founder and CEO of BlackSky, part of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries, Inc., said the Earth-observation sector is moving from “mapping towards real-time monitoring.”

The company, which today announced a partnership with Thales Alenia Space to build a constellation of 60 high-resolution satellites with an hourly revisit time, sees its major business in an AI-driven platform combining data from its own satellites with data from competitors’ satellites to provide near-real-time information about any area of the world.

“No one wants to stare at the screen and monitor picture after picture,” said Andrews. “It’s about going from buying data to buying answers. We need to be able to engage with customers who don’t know anything about geospatial data and build products that people want to use.”

Andrews said BlackSky’s platform uses artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze information available on social media as well as global news feeds to determine areas of interest and provide imagery in real time as situations such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks unfold.

In addition to cloud-based data analytics platforms, Bobby Machinski, founder and CEO of San Jose, California-based satellite information and analytics company Hera Systems, said the future would favor processing data directly onboard satellites.

“It’s about getting answers as quickly as possible,” Machinski said.

The panelists also agreed the future would probably favor vertical integration of satellite companies with data processing and analytics firms as the majority of the revenues is to be made from selling insights to customers across sectors including oil and gas, financial markets, insurance and defense.

“We are building satellites because we need the data,” said Payam Banazadeh, CEO of Silicon Valley-based Capella Space, which is planning to launch six months from now what they describe as the first U.S. commercial SAR satellite constellation. “It’s not about the satellite, it’s about the software.”

Emiliano Kargieman, CEO of Brazil’s Satellogic said: “In my mind, vertical integration will win. It has many advantages to do the data acquisition and data analytics. Why would you let the pie go into the hands of the people who do the analytics?”

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Morocco will launch next November 8th its first Pleiade satellite from the European space port of Kourou in French Guiana, according to some Moroccan web sites.

Built by Airbus defense & Space Company, this Moroccan satellite will be launched with an Italian Vega rocket.

Designed as a dual civil/military system, Pleiades deliver very-high-resolution optical data products in record time and offer a daily revisit capability to any point on the globe.
They are able to obtain data in double-quick time. These types of satellites operate as a constellation in the same orbit, phased 180° apart.

Pleiades can also provide imagery anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours in response to a crisis or natural disaster. These satellites offer a wide coverage, fine detail, intensive monitoring, extensive archives and 50 cm resolution imagery.

This satellite system was born under the French-Italian ORFEO program (Optical & Radar Federated Earth Observation) between 2001 and 2003.

Equipped with innovative latest-generation space technologies like fiber-optic gyros and control moment gyros, Pleiades-HR 1A and 1B offer exceptional roll, pitch and yaw (slew) agility, enabling the system to maximize the number of acquisitions above a given area.

This agility coupled with particularly dynamic image acquisition programing make the Pleiades system very responsive to specific user requirements.

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R&D achievements of CMEMS

Mercator Ocean (Global Ocean Forecasting Centre) based in Toulouse is happy to inform about the publication of the special issue of the Mercator Ocean Journal #56 focussing on the R&D achievements of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS).

Available at the following link

While recent advances in geospatial technologies offer great promise, the specifics of whether and how data and information are used too often remain a black (magic) box; spatially enabled decision-makers are a bit like idealised unicorns.

Without a keen knack for navigating political and administrative influences, spatial enablement can at times seem like the stuff of magic and unicorns – a fantasy. Simply creating and providing useful information does not mean that it will be used, or used wisely.

Similarly, a ‘partnership framework’ for spatial data infrastructure can seem like a mythical item. Harold Seidman, a 20th-century public administration scholar, likened the quest for effective inter-agency coordination to the mediaeval search for the philosopher’s stone…:“If only we can find the right formula for coordination, we can reconcile the irreconcilable, harmonise competing and wholly divergent interests, overcome irrationalities in our government structures, and make hard policy choices for which no one disagrees.”

Thankfully, GSDI members – Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente [1] and KU Leuven—University of Leuven [2] – conduct interdisciplinary and longitudinal research that is advancing our understanding of the geospatial data ecosystem. These institutions grapple with complex issues affecting data collection, data sharing and interoperability – namely, adaptation and cultivation. Both are co-authors of papers in the recently published special issue on innovative geoinformation tools for governance in the ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information [3].

One paper, entitled ‘Evolving Spatial Data Infrastructures and the Role of Adaptive Governance’, emphasises the importance of having a mixture of governance approaches to support inter-agency coordination. The authors found that central governments are simultaneously expanding their ability to steer, while still enabling dialogue and participation. Another paper, entitled ‘Tensions in Rural Water Governance: The Elusive Functioning of Rural Water Points in Tanzania’, shows the significance of a cultivation approach, which allows for improvisation. The authors stress that the development of administrative, financial and computing technologies best not be viewed as a well-defined process with pre-configured start and end states; unforeseen consequences and drift from the expected are inevitable. Both papers are open access, and GSDI encourages the geospatial community to take a look.

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NAIROBI, (Xinhua) — Scientists started a three-day international conference on Wednesday by calling on sub-Saharan Africa to adopt geo-spatial technologies to help achieve United Nations anti-poverty goals.

The director general of the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), Emmanuel Nkurunziza, said such technologies offer avenues for governments in fast tracking decision-making in achieving 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“Once policy-makers in the region resort to application of science, the goals will be achieved within a given time frame,” Nkurunziza said during the opening of the first space science conference in Nairobi.

He told policy-makers to upscale the application of the science since RCMDR has experts who are ready to help them explore the possibility of prioritizing space science to help spur growth in their countries.

The RCMRD was established in Nairobi in 1975 under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the then Organization of African Unity (OAU), today African Union (AU).

The inter-governmental organization now has 20 “contracting member states” in eastern and southern Africa regions—Botswana, Burundi, Comoros, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somali, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

NAIROBI, (Xinhua) — Agrina Mussa, Malawi’s Ambassador to Kenya speaks during the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for development (RCMRD) First International Conference in Nairobi. XINHUA PHOTO: CHARLES ONYANGO

Nkurunziza noted that the technologies are capable of helping people cope with climate change and food insecurity, two problems that affect agriculture in east and southern African countries.

“The technologies are a benefit to human kind and this generation cannot afford to miss the applications of space science and earth observations since they remain connected to the base where real lives are lived and the true value of scientific and technological advancements is realized,” he added.

The scientist noted that RCMRD will continue living up to promoting sustainable development through generation, application and dissemination of geo-information and allied ICT services and products to member states and beyond.

Nkurunziza said the RCMDR is currently providing primary service in drought monitoring, frost forecasting in tea growing areas, stream flow and flood prediction, land cover mapping and vulnerability assessment.

Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Land and Physical Planning Jacob Kaimenyi said the country is establishing a state-of-the-art positioning system, known as Kenya Geodetic Reference Frame (KENREF), for data acquisition and processing.

This, Kaimenyi said, follows a recommendation by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the UN Global Geospatial Information Management (UNGGIM).

He said Kenya now uses space technology to ascertain proper boundary rights registration and issuance of title deeds to millions of citizens.

China showcases literature on tropical diseases, ancient printing at Kenya fair

By Ben Ochieng’and Wang Xiaopeng NAIROBI (Xinhua) — A delegation of Chinese publishing sector on Wednesday showcased books on how to prevent and treat tropical diseases that have ravaged Africa during the opening day of the five-day Nairobi International Book Fair, which is on its 20th edition this year.

“The book fair is very famous in China. We prepared adequately for the event and the stand proved popular on the first day,” Chen Yingjie, an official with the delegation told Xinhua. “We anticipate the crowd to grow in the subsequent days.”

The book fair, which is organized by the Kenya Publishers Association, is one of the leading exhibitions in Africa, drawing writers of creative works or factual texts that serve as reflection of society.

Chen said exchanges of literature among nations was one way of enhancing friendship between peoples of different backgrounds, adding that both Kenyan and Chinese have the aspect of friendship as a common denominator.

The medical books, set to be on sale at the tail-end of the event, shed light on how tropical diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea and scabies among others can be contained in the tropical region of Africa, which is more severely ravaged by infectious diseases in comparison to the temperate world.

There was also display of woodblock printing by artist Wei Lizhong. He demonstrated the ancient Chinese color printing art at the stand, which proved very popular with visitors to the fair, some of whom participated in the printing under the guide of Wei.

The activity attracted more than 300 visitors by midday, Chen said. Sofia, a primary student, was one of them. She said she liked the Chinese art because it was very interesting.

According to the organizers, the Chinese event was one of the highlights at the fair, which has drawn a total of 76 exhibitors including 16 international presenters this year.

“The number of visitors to the fair has been growing exponentially over the years. Last year we received over 26,000 guests and we anticipate the figure to be surpassed this time round if the trend continues,” said James Odhiambo, the Executive Officer of the Kenya Publishing Association.

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