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Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging today announced that it has changed its name to ERDAS, Inc.

Recently making several acquisitions, the combined company is reintroducing the ERDAS name and will do business under this name moving forward. Building off an established brand in the industry, ERDAS is known for developing the most advanced geospatial technology and delivering reliable customer service and support worldwide. As the earth to business company, the new ERDAS’ product portfolio encompasses the entire geospatial information lifecycle of authoring, managing, connecting and delivering integrated business data.

ERDAS offers a depth and breadth of knowledge, enabling organizations to create value from large volumes of geospatial data captured from a variety of sources. In 2007, the division acquired Acquis, ER Mapper and IONIC, providing the company with new technology and strengthening its global presence. Broadening its offerings, the company’s portfolio not only appeals to existing geospatial customers, but also to those with larger web and enterprise needs. Building on a rich history and expertise in geospatial imaging, ERDAS has secured its position to be a leader in the broader geospatial information market.

“Across a broad range of industries, more organizations are using geospatial information to drive business decisions and processes,” said Bob Morris, President & CEO, ERDAS. “ERDAS is defining the systems that will put the information around our changing earth to work in business.”

ERDAS provides the most dynamic geospatial solutions to meet everyday business needs. ERDAS solutions meet the full spectrum of an organization’s requirements, transforming geospatial data into information useful for decision-making processes. By incorporating standards-based interoperability, ERDAS ensures that data is seamlessly integrated for desktop, enterprise, web-based and mobile clients. With Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) compliance, ERDAS develops standards-based solutions with the most advanced service-oriented platform available. By leveraging new and existing technologies, ERDAS incorporates existing technological strengths in image exploitation, processing, visualization and geospatial data management to meet a broader spectrum of customer needs in today’s enterprise environment.

“ERDAS is positioned to help organizations harness the information of the changing earth for greater advantage,” said Mladen Stojic, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Marketing, ERDAS. “With a growing portfolio, ERDAS delivers geospatial business systems that transform our earth’s data into business information.”

Moving forward, Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging is now ERDAS, Inc, effective April 3, 2008.

About ERDAS: ERDAS – The Earth to Business Company – helps organizations harness the information of the changing earth for greater advantage. ERDAS creates geospatial business systems that transform our earth’s data into business information, enabling individuals, businesses and public agencies to quickly access, manage, process and share that information from anywhere. Using secure geospatial information, ERDAS solutions improve employee, customer and partner visibility to information, enabling them to respond faster and collaborate better. It also means better decision-making, increased productivity and new revenue streams. Welcome to ERDAS: a trusted name, with a new energy, and a new vision. Earth to business starts here.

ERDAS is a part of the Hexagon Group, Sweden. For more information about ERDAS or its products and services, please call +1 770 776 3400, toll free +1 866 534 2286, or visit www.erdas.com.

Geo: International

BKS Surveys Ltd has recently been awarded a major contract by the Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, Rijkswaterstaat, Data-ICT-Dienst for the supply of AHN2 Digital Ground model for Parcel No.2 in the North of The Netherlands.

The contract is one of two Lots awarded under AHN2 Contract DI-5524 and involves BKS acquiring and processing low level LiDAR data of an area covering approximately 365,000 hectares. For the data acquisition, BKS will use Fugro’s FLI-MAP 400 helicopter mounted LiDAR system that combines an ultra-high frequency (150KHz) LiDAR with forward and nadir facing digital cameras and videos to capture high density (10pts per m2) point cloud data and associated imagery to survey flood defence assets.

Acquisition of the data began mid-January and will be completed by March. The raw collected data will then be filtered to produce a 50cm grid height model of the area with the entire project due for completion by November 2008.

BKS have considerable experience in the execution of LiDAR data collection and are the UK and Ireland agents for the FLI-MAP system of Fugro, employing it on various contracts including National LiDAR Framework agreement for the UK Highways Agency and the survey of river embankments for various regions of the Environment Agency.

More at BKS

Geo: International

The new direction of space geoinformatics started to progress in Russia and in the world, pertaining to the creation of geoportals and web-map services.

First Russian geoportals are Yandex.Maps and Kosmosnimki with satellite geolocated mosaics of largest cities and central administrative regions.

An important issue in a geoportal development is to fill it in with updated space images and to created mosaics from a set of satellite imagery. The solution can be the integration of geoportals and regional centers of operational RS data reception into a unified solid production mechanism.

On March 25-27 the St-Petersburg Central R&D Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics partnered with ScanEx R&D Center to showcase the real-time processing and transfer of space images, acquired from RS satellites, via encoded Internet channels to the customers of the government committee of St-Petersburg.

Earth Remote Sensing Center at the St-Petersburg Central R&D Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics, equipped with the Uniscan ground receiving station provided the RADARSAT-1, SPOT-2, SPOT-4, EROS-A and TERRA data reception.

Kosmosnimki geo-service of ScanEx Center was used as a prototype of the regional geoportal. Relevant committees of Leningrad Region and North-Western Federal District administrations can be the potential clients of such geoportal.

Special attention was paid to the possibility of near real-time data reception from the all-weather RADARSAT-1 radar satellite. One of the images of the city and of the dike was acquired on the evening of March 25 during the blizzard with wind blasts over St-Petersburg.

The demonstrated version of geoportal can be used as a catalog for quick search for geospatial data and a tool for assessment and analysis of ecological situation, nature use control and environmental and high risk areas monitoring.

More at: www.scanex.com

Geo: International

The Television Infrared Observation Satellite I (TIROS-I) was launched on April 1, 1960, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It was the world’s first weather observation satellite, providing proof that weather forecasting could be accurately performed in space.

This satellite was the first of a series of satellites (TIROS) that NASA sent into orbit as an experiment to see if satellites could be used to study the Earth. Its goal was to show that a global weather satellite system was possible. (As we know now, such a global system is very possible, and very valuable to all people on Earth.)

The TIROS spacecraft was developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and managed by the U.S. Environmental Science Services Administration. It was manufactured by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

It was launched at 6:40 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) onboard a three-stage Thor-Able rocket system. TIROS-I was launched into a 99.19-minute orbit.

After being inserted into orbit, TIROS I (also called 1960-[Beta]2) sent back the first television picture from space.

From its nearly circular pro-grade orbit, which ranged from 495 to 539 miles (796 to 867 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface, the TIROS-I took television pictures of weather patterns down below in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Its orbit was considered a semi-polar orbit; that is, its orbit took it about half-way to the North and South Poles so that it could eventually observe much of the surface of the Earth. Specifically, it was in an orbit that was 48 degrees to the equatorial plane, where 0 degrees is located at the equatorial plane and 90 degrees is located at the poles.

Source ITWIRE

In the last decade, the value of Earth Observation (EO) to society has significantly grown among both the public at large and policy makers worldwide.

As presented in a recent article on Earthzine (Scanning the Globe) the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is coordinating efforts to build a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS. Launched in response to calls for action by the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and by the G8 (Group of Eight) leading industrialized countries, GEOSS is to: enhance the coordination of observations of the Earth system, facilitate data management and distribution solutions, reach international agreements on data sharing principles, and directly encourage the development of operational applications linked to societal needs

In addition to improving data access and availability, Michael Rast, a GEO Secretariat member seconded by the European Space Agency, has often underlined the need to assure the quality of such data. Quality is indeed a condicio sine qua non GEOSS can achieve its objectives. Indeed, for the “System of Systems” to be fully successful, the calibration, validation and intercalibration between instruments are tasks of primary importance. Harmonised procedures for such activities would ensure the required data quality control and the sensors interoperability in the framework of long-term and multi-mission applications.

The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), the space contribution to GEOSS as defined during its 19th Plenary meeting, identified the need to take a lead in tackling these issues. The CEOS Working Group on Calibration and Validation (WGCV), established consensus within the international community on a roadmap towards the establishment of Cal/Val best practices built upon the key principle of demonstrating traceability to internationally agreed references. These best practices will be issued as CEOS endorsed guidelines, under the auspices of GEO, for implementation by the member agencies of CEOS. It is important to appreciate that such guidelines could, with time, be improved upon in order to accommodate new sensors, technology and methodological improvements.

Harmonisation of Best Practices

A common and endorsed set of fully-documented best practices for calibration, validation and intercalibration processes would harmonise the sometimes disjointed procedures and directly respond to the GEOSS requirement for data quality assurance.

Through CEOS WGCV, international experts are discussing and agreeing on this set of procedures, covering all EO space-borne instruments and specialities. More specifically, the WGCV has the following subgroups: Atmospheric Composition, Infrared and Visible Optical Sensors (IVOS), Land Product Validation (LPV), Microwave Sensors (MS), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Terrain Mapping ™. They shall address:

(1) Pre-launch activities:

(a) Full instrument cycle test (including instrument and environmental modeling) to ensure every element is traceable to SI standards where possible
(b) All calibration data and procedures should be documented and kept

(2) Onboard calibration devices and activities (when applicable):

(a) Should be concept proven and characterized
(b) Should be traceable
© The witness samples should be kept

(3) Post launch activities:

(a) Vicarious calibration using ground sites/scenarios
(b) Permanent reference sites that can be used for cal/val and inter-calibration of other satellite sensors via simultaneous and collocated observations

(4) Auxiliary tools and methods such as Radiative Transfer
Models, as well as full end-to-end system simulation tools for all sensors must be documented, maintained and openly available.

Cal/Val Scenario Endorsement

The harmonisation guidelines will also establish a set of Cal/Val scenarios that seek to serve all sectors of the Cal/Val community and that shall be endorsed by CEOS. In this context, a scenario could either be a single site or may well be a series of linked (by common protocols and facilities) ‘sites’, e.g. the Network for Detection of Atmospheric Climate Change (NDACC) series would be regarded as a ‘reference site’.

Each WGCV subgroup (representing each major thematic EO specialisation) is currently tasked to define the requirements for Cal/Val scenarios and the characteristics that they should exhibit and satisfy in relation their field of expertise and specific objectives.

Data Access

CEOS has also agreed that Cal/Val data (satellite, airborne and in situ) and relevant documentation on the best practices should be made freely accessible online. Preliminary services are currently being provided through the CEOS Cal/Val Portal developed by ESA. The employment of a dedicated Cal/Val portal is ensuring that datasets are not duplicated unduly, that an efficient and secure knowledge transfer is implemented and that cooperation is encouraged through an international effort. It is important to stress that the provided data shall include complete documentation of the entire process to ensure that there is full traceability.

In the specific case of Cal/Val data, totally open access to the whole EO community could hurt the Cal/Val activity dramatically if for instance users erroneously ‘re-do’ calibrations. Therefore, it will be necessary to clearly control data access and data upload. Currently a solution would be to have internationally peer-reviewed projects that obtain accessibility to specific data and the possibility to upload their measurements, ensuring both the quality and traceability of such ‘raw’ data. Additionally, the actual data utilisation would also have to be governed by a dedicated Cal/Val data policy (code of use) to avoid misuse of preliminary data sets and publication of erroneous results.

Conclusion

Overall, these harmonisation guidelines are addressing data quality information. The computation and presentation of data accuracy levels, error bars, completeness and correctness of each processing step should be harmonised. All processes need to be traceable and shall contain the required quality information needed to understand the suitability of the procedures used and subsequently to progress in the chain of analysis.

Comprising 26 Members (most of which are space agencies) and 20 Associates (associated national and international organizations), CEOS is recognized as the major international forum for the coordination of EO satellite programmes and for interaction of these programmes with users of satellite data worldwide. Through its open workshops and meetings, CEOS promotes the widest possible involvement in its processes and always encourages proactive contributions by all participating bodies.

By Giuseppe Ottavianelli

Source earthzine

Maurici Lucena, Director General of CDTI (the Spanish Innovation Agency, which belongs to the Ministry of Industry Tourism and Trade) will chair the ESA Council for the next two years effective from 1 July.

Lucena was unanimously elected Chairman of the ESA Council at the 199th ESA Council meeting held at ESRIN, ESA’s Centre for Earth Observation in Frascati, Italy, on 13 and 14 March. He will take over from Mr Per Tegnér of Sweden, who is chairing the Council until 30 June.

Born in 1975 in Barcelona, Spain, Maurici Lucena graduated in Economics and Management Sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona in 1997 and was awarded a Master of Economics and Finance at CEMFI (Centre for Monetary and Financial Studies, Bank of Spain) in Madrid in 1999.

He worked five years as a consultant in different fields of economic analysis and as an Associate Professor in the Department of Economy of the University Carlos III in Madrid.

In 2004 he was appointed Director General of CDTI and has since then been the Head of the Spanish Delegation at ESA.

More information

ESA Media Relations Service
Communication and Knowledge Department

Tel: +33 (0)1 5369 7299
Fax: +33 (0)1 5369 7690

A new global portrait taken from space details Earth’s land cover with a resolution never before obtained.

ESA, in partnership with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, presented the preliminary version of the map to scientists last week at the 2nd GlobCover User Consultation workshop held in Rome, Italy.

Earth’s land cover has been charted from space before, but this map, which will be made available to the public upon its completion in July, has a resolution 10 times sharper than any of its predecessors.

Scientists, who will use the data to plot worldwide land-cover trends, study natural and managed ecosystems and to model climate change extent and impacts, are hailing the product – generated under the ESA-initiated GlobCover project – as ‘a milestone.’

“The GlobCover system is a great step forward in our capacities to automatically produce new global land cover products with a finer resolution and a more detailed thematic content than ever achieved in the past,” Frederic Achard of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) said.

“This GlobCover product is much more than a map. It is an operational scientific and technical demonstration of the first automated land cover mapping on a global scale and may provide the detailed description of the land surface states needed for regional climate modelling,” said Prof. Pierre Defourny, from the Universite catholique de Louvain, who designed the land classification process.

“Land cover data is an essential requirement of the sustainable management of natural resources, environmental protection, food security, climate change and humanitarian programmes,” John Latham of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said.

“The GlobCover product will be the first freely available product at 300m resolution and is therefore a milestone product which will be fundamental to a broad level stakeholder community.”

Jaap van Woerden from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said: “This map can greatly support the work of UNEP and partners in addressing environmental priority issues such as climate change and ecosystem management.”

Prof. Christiane Schmullius from the University of Jena in Germany said the new GlobCover product “revolutionises global land cover mapping.”

“This map can greatly support the work of UNEP and partners in addressing environmental priority issues such as climate change and ecosystem management.”

The map is based on 20 Terabytes of imagery – equivalent to the content of 20 million books – acquired from May 2005 to April 2006 by Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument.

All images then undergo a standardised processing technique developed and operated by Medias-France/Postel, together with Brockmann Consult, the Universite catholique de Louvain and partners.

There are 22 different land cover types shown in the map, including croplands, wetlands, forests, artificial surfaces, water bodies and permanent snow and ice. For maximum user benefit, the map’s thematic legend is compatible with the UN Land Cover Classification System (LCCS).

GlobCover, launched in 2005, is part of ESA’s Earth Observation Data User Element (DUE). An international network of partners is working with ESA on the project, including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), FAO, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Environmental Agency (EEA), the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the Global Observations of Forest Cover and Global Observations of Land Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) Implementation Team Project Office.

For more information about GlobCover products and their availability, please visit the GlobCover website

Source ESA

India will later this month launch a remote sensing satellite equipped with high-resolution cameras and advanced scientific instruments, space agency officials said.

Cartosat-2A, as the all-weather, reconnaissance satellite is called, will be used to plan urban and rural development projects. It can also be used for intelligence gathering, the officials said.

“The tentative launch date is April 28,” Indian Space Research Organisation chairman G. Madhavan Nair told reporters in Bangalore where the agency is based.

“The exact date and time will be finalised in a fortnight after factoring weather and other relevant data,” he added.

Identical to the mapping satellite Cartosat-2, which was launched in January 2007, the 680-kilogram (1,500-pound) Cartosat-2A will be placed in a polar orbit at an altitude of 630 kilometres (391 miles).

The satellite will be launched by the Indian-developed rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, from the Sriharikota space station in southern India.

India started its space programme in 1963, and has since developed and put several of its own satellites into space. It has also designed and built launch rockets to reduce its dependence on overseas space agencies.

Space agency chairman Nair said the body has finalised a project report concerning a manned mission by 2014-15.

“The report is being submitted to the government for approval and budgetary allocation,” he said. “The Space Commission, headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, will meet next week or so to review the report and take a decision.”

Source SpaceMart

DigitalGlobe today announced that WorldView-1 has reached Full Operating Capability (FOC) for all customers. The general availability of WorldView-1 imagery marks the final milestone for the satellite which launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on September 18, 2007, delivered its first sample set of high-resolution images on October 15 and began supplying imagery to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) on November 26.

Jan 2008
“Following a successful roll-out with the NGA as part of the NextView program, DigitalGlobe is now taking orders for WorldView-1 imagery from its global resellers, partners and customers,” said Jill Smith, chief executive officer of DigitalGlobe. “General availability of WorldView-1 imagery allows us to more aggressively serve the growing global demand for accurate, high-resolution satellite imagery and geospatial information.”

WorldView-1, with its superior increase in capability and capacity, and QuickBird, DigitalGlobe’s other high-resolution satellite, together operate as the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite constellation. The two satellites are collecting up to 900,000 square kilometers of new imagery per day, an unprecedented level that will enable faster turn-around on collection and rapid updating of DigitalGlobe’s ImageLibrary. DigitalGlobe has the largest, most current collection of relevant spatial information, with over 350 million square kilometers currently available in the ImageLibrary. Almost all imagery collected is made available to its customers online. DigitalGlobe’s own high resolution satellite collection and archive is complemented with significant aerial collection, and third party content and data to provide the most complete, easy to use and integrate content solutions for its customers. DigitalGlobe’s ImageLibrary: http://browse.digitalglobe.com/imagefinder/.

DigitalGlobe content solutions have countless uses in professional and consumer markets; oil and gas, telecommunications, utilities, mining and other natural resource development; personal navigation, mobile devices and automotive as well as online mapping and portals.

For more information click here

Source: DigitalGlobe

Japan: The priority has been how research funds should be invested, but the standout characteristic for fiscal 2008’s budget looks to be returning benefits of research back to society.

Since the mid-1990s, when Japan set a goal of becoming a world leader in science and technology, budgets for that purpose have been lavishly appropriated. The priority has been how research funds should be invested, but the standout characteristic for fiscal 2008’s budget looks to be returning benefits of research back to society.

The fiscal 2008 budget for science and technology is about 3.57 trillion yen, an increase of about 60 billion yen, or 1.7 percent, from fiscal 2007. Since the enactment of the Science and Technology Basic Law in 1995, the government has formulated a science and technology basic plan every five years and has appropriated budgets guided by these plans.

Even during times of penny-pinching, budgets for science and technology have been treated preferentially as “investments for tomorrow.” But starting in fiscal 2004, they saw slight year-on-year declines. This means the fiscal 2008 turnaround comes as a boon to researchers and others in the field. But when looking at the content of the appropriations, things are a bit different, because the Cabinet Office in charge of such budgets has changed the way it tabulates such budgets.

Take the appropriations for space development. Conventionally, spending for the development of satellites and rockets was a major chunk of these appropriations. But starting with the fiscal 2008 budget, tabulations also heavily factored in fields of application.

This includes spending on images taken by foreign Earth observation satellites for research purposes. Other cases include spending for research and publication of patented technologies.

“We want to change the public’s concept of science and technology investment,” a Cabinet Office official said.

In the first basic plan for fiscal 1996-2000, the government allotted about 18 trillion yen over a broad scope of research, much of which was denounced as pork-barrel spending. Given this, the second basic plan for fiscal 2001-05 called for intensive investment in specific research fields, creating different levels of investment between favored and unfavored areas. The third five-year plan, starting in fiscal 2006, gives a detailed list of investments in such classifications as “state key technology” and “science and technology with strategic importance,” but still presents a blurry overall impression.

In fiscal 2008, the third year of the third basic plan, the government aims to boost support for science and technology investment by strongly calling for technological developments to yield returns to society.

There has been a trend in research to only announce achievements that are covered in research papers or get patents, a Cabinet Office official pointed out. Masuo Aizawa, a member of the Council for Science and Technology Policy, said: “There’s no science and technology that is just for science and technology’s sake. It benefits society, and there should be a system to help science and technology benefit society.”

To do this, it is necessary to reform approaches toward research.

“Japan’s research and development of technology for robots is splendid, but to apply such technology to household chores and medical treatment, it’s necessary to take a comprehensive approach involving the cooperation of various fields,” one expert said. This means it is essential to establish a flexible system free of the shackles of organizational interests and to also fund it well.

As a first step in that direction, the government has put forth a policy of financially supporting a project by Kyoto University Prof. Shinya Yamanaka, who announced in December that his team had successfully produced induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. His request for full support was given an immediate response.

A new strategy of using science and technology for diplomacy also has emerged. Starting in fiscal 2008, the Foreign Ministry and the Education, Science and Technology Ministry will provide cooperation in science and technology to developing countries by using official development assistance and other means. This is a deliberate departure from the image of ODA being mostly for constructing roads and bridges.

While it may appear otherwise, the government is having trouble landing all of the 24 trillion yen targeted in the whole of the third basic plan.

There are a host of problems that cannot be resolved by the aforementioned measures. For example, budget allocations to cover state universities’ fundamental expenses for education and research have been decreasing annually. Such budgets for fiscal 2008 are set to be cut by about 23 billion yen, or 1.9 percent, from the previous fiscal year. Another problem is the difficulty young researchers are having landing jobs after finishing doctorate courses.

Work on the fourth basic plan will begin in fiscal 2008. The plan must be studied steadily from the viewpoint of future benefits to society while also conducting fact-finding surveys and collecting opinions from researchers.