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(6 October 2016) In an era of profound digital transformation, business leaders and IT experts are convening at ESA’s mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, today for the first SAP Digital Leaders’ Summit.

Under the theme “Gain the competitive edge in a disruptive world”, the summit provides an opportunity for European chief executive officers and future digital leaders to exchange ideas on next-generation business and technology landscapes.

Topics including strategy in the digital age and how outer space impacts digital society, politics and economy are being addressed.

In February, SAP and ESA signed a letter of intent to develop innovative approaches for the quick and efficient processing of large amounts of Earth observation data through access to real-time platforms.

The amount of data from ESA satellites including the Sentinels for Europe’s Copernicus programme – controlled by teams at the European Space Operations Centre where today’s event is being held– is a challenge for traditional data processing and handling.

Through the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, quick and efficient processing of vast amounts of Earth observation data is possible, and opens access to many new applications and users working with the SAP cloud solutions.

Driven by the SAP Center for Digital Leadership, SAP intends to develop further solutions and technologies based on elastic cloud-platforms such as SAP HANA Spatial and Earth observation data from ESA. The results are planned to become reality in new services, showcase, and new fields of applications for SAP and ESA customers. Entrepreneurs, partners and SAP customers around the world will be able to build their businesses on top of SAP technology while leveraging geospatial information.

Today’s summit is an important step in the ESA–SAP collaboration, which also foresees joint promotional activities for start-up companies and small- and medium-sized enterprises. A session will be devoted to digital start-up innovation, where winners from ESA’s App Camps and the Copernicus Masters will present their ideas, together with teams from the SAP HANA Startup Focus Programme.

“More and more applications will be platform-based in the future. To reach the users it is important that data providers and platform operators join forces. This is the idea behind the strategic partnership between ESA and SAP,” said Volker Liebig, former Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes.

“From the ESA side, we bring the vast amount of information coming from ESA’s scientific satellite missions as well as the data delivered by the European Copernicus satellites. Together with SAP we expect to gain access to new user groups and pave the way for new satellite-based applications.”

Dr Carsten Linz, Business Development Officer and Global Head of SAP’s Center for Digital Leadership, said: “Smart data is the new golden nugget in the digital age. However, data alone is not knowledge. Platform-based innovation makes it easier than ever to create a winning digital strategy where data-driven insight and action are true, smart assets.

“Today’s summit demonstrates concrete digital innovation showcases from the SAP-ESA partnership as well as joint achievements in building a digital space ecosystem with start-up companies.

“The combination of the SAP HANA Spatial platform with ESA’s geospatial information opens a bright future for space-related applications, such as smart farming and smart cities which bring businesses the competitive edge and improve peoples’ lives.”

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Posted by: Philip Briscoe | Posted on Oct 05, 2016. Rezatec announced the launch process for a new set of geospatial data analytics to improve the resilience of the world’s cities to changing environmental, economic and social pressures.

The Rezatec resilience service delivers data analytics via a web-based portal to infrastructure and urban asset managers providing mission critical insights to support highly-targeted improvements and mitigating actions against subsidence, flooding, climate change and human-related urban landscape changes.

There is an escalating global need for cities to become more resilient to fast-changing human and natural environmental pressures. In tandem, there is also a growing availability of satellite-derived earth observation data that allows the hyper-detailed mapping, monitoring and analysis of the natural landscapes and the built environment.

This initiative addresses the growing requirement for predictive decision-support tools for urban infrastructure managers. Through the evolution of Rezatec’s geospatial data analytics services and the incorporation of new satellite data sources, e.g. ESA’s Sentinel 1 and 2, these tools are set to become the future of strategic urban planning.

The planned service will make use of Rezatec’s machine learning technology and techniques applied to satellite data (using a mixture of sensor types including Optical, Synthetic Aperture Radar, Thermal Infra-Red and LIDAR), Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) devices and Satellite Communications to collect and send ground data from locations where mobile network coverage cannot be relied upon.

This pioneering initiative is supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the ARTES Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme, which is dedicated to funding and promoting the development of space-based applications, services and solutions for the needs of European citizens and society at large.

Philip Briscoe, Business Unit Director, Rezatec, states “We expect the URGED project to have a profound effect on city-regional economic, environmental and human wellbeing by demonstrating the value of space data in enabling strategic investment and decision making to support more resilient development pathways.”

Roberto Cossu, Application Engineer, European Space Agency said “Rezatec’s urban resilience project is important not just in terms of commercial opportunity but its value to future cities to enable them to meet environmental and social challenges.”

Rezatec’s innovative predictive decision-support tools can identify where there is the likely high risk of subsidence and flooding by applying predictive analysis and techniques. These powerful data insights are then provided via subscription-based access to dynamically-updated data analytics as a service, which represents a new commercial model with greater scalability and price advantages than current consulting based approaches.

As an example, the project data products can be used by infrastructure management companies, water companies and town/city authorities to

  • Assess land surface movement and soil subsidence hazard;
  • Identify pipeline segments susceptible to land surface movement;
  • Forecast infrastructure and pipeline damage associated with land surface change;
  • Identify and assess exposure to drainage hazard, and;
  • Provide a relative estimation of urban flood vulnerability.

The initiative kicked-off in May 2016 and Rezatec is has started planning the pilot implementations with named end-users: Welsh Water, Wessex Water, AMEC Foster Wheeler and The Ecological Sequestration Trust (TEST).

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(by Alan Boyle on October 4). How do you channel a flood of almost 5 million images into useful applications? Google Cloud is doing it with more than 30 years’ worth of satellite imagery from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 missions, for free.

Satellite views have long been part of Google’s global mapping operation, of course. But putting them on the cloud is a different matter.

One of the newly added data sets draws upon the complete catalog of pictures from Landsat 4, 5, 7 and 8, amounting to 1.3 petabytes of data that go back to 1984. The other data set takes advantage of more than 430 terabytes’ worth of multispectral imaging from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite, which is part of the Copernicus program to monitor global environmental indicators.

The Landsat database keeps track of 4 million scenes, while the Sentinel-2 set offers 970,000 images. More pictures are being added daily.

When satellite images become available via the cloud, customers who focus on geospatial analysis don’t have to worry about downloading and organizing 1.7 quadrillion bytes of data on their own. In a Google blog posting, Descartes Labs CEO Mark Johnson explained how the shift to the cloud makes the job of predicting crop yields easier.

“To make accurate machine-learning models of major crops, we needed decades of satellite imagery from the entire globe,” Johnson said. “Thanks to Google Earth Engine hosting the entire Landsat archive publicly on Google Cloud, we can focus on algorithms instead of worrying about collecting petabytes of data. Earth observation will continue to improve with every new satellite launch, and so will our ability to forecast global food supply.”

Another venture that’s taking advantage of Google’s cloud-based satellite data is Spaceknow, which analyzes changes over time to track economic trends. Spaceknow’s algorithms digest billions of observations from Landsat satellites to determine, for example, the ups and downs of Chinese manufacturing activity.

In today’s posting, the project manager for Google Earth Engine, Peter Birch, says there’s likely to be more to come. “With dozens of public satellites in orbit and many more scheduled over the next decade, the size and complexity of geospatial imagery continues to grow,” Birch says.

There’s also likely to be more competition in the cloud as well: Amazon Web Services has its own repository of free imagery from Landsat and other Earth-watching satellites, while Microsoft’s Azure platform has been used to process MODIS satellite imagery and tease out hydrological trends.

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“UrtheCast is going to take environmental discussions from ‘tell me’ to ‘show me’ with accessible science.”
Dr. Keith Beckett, UrtheCast Chief Scientist and Resource Works Advisor

How Democratized Earth Observation Data Can Radically Change Environmental Debates

Walking the talk, with scientific rigor

When it comes to environmental and industry regulation, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has been extremely clear: Social license or ‘community buy-in’ will be absolutely necessary.

“Public input will be sought and considered. Decisions will be informed by scientific evidence. Indigenous peoples will be more fully engaged in reviewing and monitoring major resource development projects. The process will have greater transparency,” stated Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) on Jan. 27, 2016.

The need for public acceptance has been hotly debated in the public domain, both here in Canada and abroad, but its efficacy has been proven. When the public is onboard with a project, that spells a great deal of good for all stakeholders — businesses, communities, regulators, governments, and economies alike.

This is where democratized Earth Observation (EO) data can lend significant support to public conversations within and between communities, the media, organizations, and levels of government.

“The Government will demonstrate to Canadians and to the world that a clean environment and a strong economy go hand in hand. Protecting the environment and growing the economy are not incompatible goals; in fact, our future success demands that we do both.”
— Natural Resources Canada_

Calling for a ‘social license’ upgrade

Because the term is a sticky one, the phrase alone can lead to regulatory confusion. And when public opinion rails against scientific research economic realities, it becomes even harder to determine the best course of action to benefit all stakeholders.

But when every stakeholder has access to the same accurate, timely information — democratized EO data — this can help us raise our level of our public discourse and help communities make better-informed decisions. Greater responsibility, then, falls on the community, thus raising the likelihood of widespread buy-in.

“In the 20 years to 2014, resource capital investment in B.C. amounted to $100 billion — second only to housing. Much of this was in natural gas and it translated directly into innovation and foundational job roles in the energy value chain.”
— Stewart Muir, Vancouver Sun, Resource Works Executive Director

Raising the level of public discourse

Democratizing Earth’s data from space with multiple sensors — especially with daily regular revisits over the same area, cloud free, from our proposed UrtheDaily™ constellation — has already allowed for unprecedented access to information that was previously in the hands of large companies and governments.

Beyond the need for accessibility, the UrthePlatform allows for the efficient extraction of science-backed information from that imagery. As Dr. Keith Beckett, UrtheCast’s Chief Scientist explains, this data can provide more merit to social license and help the public make more informed decisions:

“To date, virtually all of the scientific data that forms the basis of the resource industry’s and regulator’s decision making process is largely hidden or requires an expert to interpret it, thus shutting off any possibility for meaningful dialogue between the various stakeholders. We are going to turn this around by exposing the data for all to see and by presenting the data in an easy-to-understand way that leads directly to a high-level of social engagement. UrtheCast is providing an API access to this rich EO data archive, allowing everyone to develop their own image interpretation algorithms.”

“Google shows the world with old JPEG quality imagery. Using a similar, easy-to-use interface, UrtheCast shows the world with the most recent and scientific quality imagery that applying algorithms to that imagery to extract specific types of information not traditionally derivable from just RGB imagery.”
— Dr. Keith Beckett

Scientific data is simply inaccessible

As things stand, scientific data has an accessibility problem. Add to that an inability to crunch and communicate that data in an understandable way and efforts toward transparency are impeded.

“In virtually every resource industry, be it surface, subsurface or aquaculture development, organizations suffer the same limiting factor of inaccessible or difficult-to-understand scientific data. This situation is the direct result of industries being overly protective of their information and governments being unable to deliver meaningful information,” Keith notes. “We have to go beyond opening up EO, toward making that information digestible and interactive. In that way, this science-backed information via the UrthePlatform will substantially raise the level of comprehension.”
bq. “UrtheCast will be instrumental by making available science-backed information, through the UrthePlatform, to all stakeholders in the resource development industry.”
— Dr. Keith Beckett

Why industries are wary

While transparency is key, talking about those wins and losses — showing those wins and losses — isn’t always comfortable. Some industries in particular are reluctant to pull back the curtain.

“The oil production industry prefers that the public not be able to observe its operations because of perceptions that the industry is ‘dirty’. On the flip side, the oil industry is taking steps to clean up its dirty perception and there is a real need to show the positive strides that are being achieved,” Keith explains. “Having access to current information allows a faster response and mitigation when unexpected changes or events occur, or the change is gradual and nuanced because the environmental response is slower.”

Take for example, oil leak detection: “There is potential here to detect slow leaks from pipelines, although we would be unable to detect every leak due to ‘confusers’ in the imagery. Mainly, the normal phenological (growth cycle) variations. That said, there is some data science behind the possibility of detecting leaks, and we would need to quantify how reliable that detection capability may be. We don’t have good data to support this level of reliability just yet, but we have an ‘it’s possible’ assessment. That’s where further R&D will come in.”

“Once the shovels are put away, how is the environment recovering? We can help provide a benchmark against which we can then continue monitoring over the lifetime of the project, for instance a pipeline, and the surrounding areas.”
— Dr. Keith Beckett

What industries stand to gain

In British Columbia, industries like hydroelectricity, mining, and forestry are key economic drivers. With jobs on the line, the management of those industries, both business-wise and under the community lens, becomes all the more important.

“The hydroelectricity industry, for instance, prefers that the public not be able to observe the scale of the Site-C project. On the flip side, new opportunities for recreation are being created and there is a real need to show the positive benefits,” says Keith. “Firstly, it establishes the current environmental situation ‘before shovels go into the ground’. Reaching back into the archive can help tell us a story of what is happening in the long term as well. As shovels go into the ground, we can monitor the environmental impact, “both where the shovels are going as well as the surrounding areas — waterways in particular,” Dr. Beckett says.

This concern over transparency can also be observed in mining, herd farming, fish farming, agriculture, water management, land and water transportation, land use — the list of applications and industries is in some ways limitless.
“The future of British Columbia is going to be more linked to the prosperity of the high-tech sector in the long run. A large part of this is because technology is driving improvements in how resources are used and in how our tight land base can be managed responsibly … From this emerges a virtuous circle of resource discovery, environmental protection, development, social growth, all of it mediated by technological innovation. This is the dominant characteristic of British Columbia’s modern economy.”
— Stewart Muir, Vancouver Sun

We’re only beginning to realize open EO data’s potential

While UrtheCast’s fleet of current and planned sensors is one of the most diverse in the business, and while we are including external sensors on the UrthePlatform, we’re still only on the precipice of a shakeup, which will give rise to greater social, environmental, and economic responsibility.

“Gaining public confidence can go awry when the public isn’t informed as much as possible — we can help make this required information more accessible. We’re ahead of that curve, our data sources keep growing, and the use of this data for social proof has already begun. For now, UrtheCast is already able to deliver these services using Deimos-1 and other space-based sources of imagery. As UrtheDaily, and later OptiSAR, comes on line, the improved spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions will greatly improve the type, accuracy and currency of the information. In the future, we’ll be using data from all UrtheCast sensors, but especially the UrtheCast constellation, and UrtheDaily* and Deimos-1 in particular.”

_“Climate Change is real. Putting aside the debate over the causes, this is a scientific fact. The accelerating impacts of Climate Change on the environment, on resource development, on human activity and so on, demands more and better information, available at a higher frequency of observation in order to understand, mitigate and respond to these impacts. The public and industry absolutely needs a place where they can go to easily obtain this information.”
— Dr. Keith Beckett_

Source Urthecast

in Cape Town, South Africa from 16 and 18 January 2017.


JOIN together in this unique event with governments, businesses, civil society and the scientific and academic communities.
EXPLORE innovative ways to apply data and statistics to measure global progress and inform evidence-based policy decisions on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
CONTRIBUTE to important discussions, data labs and interactive platforms aimed at improving the use of data for sustainable development.
LAUNCH new initiatives and solutions that will deliver better data for all

About

Following one of the main recommendations contained in the report entitled “A World That Counts” , presented in November 2014 by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Independent Expert and Advisory Group on Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, the Statistical Commission agreed that a United Nations World Data Forum on Sustainable Development Data (UN World Data Forum) would be the suitable platform for intensifying cooperation with various professional groups, such as information technology, geospatial information managers, data scientists, and users, as well as civil society stakeholders.

With the guidance of the Statistical Commission, and the support of the Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the High-level Group for Partnership, Coordination and Capacity-Building for statistics for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (HLG), in close consultation with member states and international partners, will be leading the discussion on the organization of the UN World Data Forum. The first United Nations World Data Forum will be hosted by Statistics South Africa in Cape Town, South Africa in January 2017. The Opening Ceremony will take place Sunday evening, 15 January, and the Forum will close on the 18 January 2017. The substantive sessions of the Forum will take place between 16 and 18 January 2017.

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Russian satellite manufacturers have signed the final agreement for the construction and launch of the National Remote Sensing Satellite for Iran, according to the MEHR News Agency.

Iranian Communications and Information Technology Minister, Mahmoud Vaezi, told the MEHR News Agency that the country is working on its space projects along two parallel lines, one of which is related to the construction of student satellites inside the country; “we have held talks with universities for the construction of communications as well as remote sensing satellites in Iran, and a number of samples have already been constructed,” he said. “By the end of the Iranian year (March 2017), we will be ready to launch one of these domestically-manufactured student satellites into space,” he added.

Vaezi stressed that the country is mainly focused on the construction of two operational satellites, adding “at the moment, the final agreement for the construction and launch of the National Remote Sensing Satellite has been signed by the Russian satellite manufacturers. The construction of the two operational satellites is a long-term project and currently, we are in talks with four countries for our communications satellite,” he said.

In his recent visit to Moscow, Mahmoud Vaezi met with several Russian government officials and industry executives on space and cyberspace issues and struck a deal with the Russian side on cooperation with the construction of a remote sensing satellite.

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Agreement between EuroGeographics and the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Emergency services responding to disasters will continue to benefit from fast access to authoritative maps from official sources following a renewed agreement between EuroGeographics and the European Environment Agency (EEA).

The agreement, first signed in 2011, enables the Copernicus Emergency Mapping Service to quickly produce maps for crisis management using geospatial data from EuroGeographics’ members, the European National Mapping, Cadastre and Land Registry Authorities (NMCAS). It was signed today (3 October) during EuroGeographics 2016 General Assembly in Budapest, Hungary which was attended by leaders from 51 NMCAS.

“Confidence in the accuracy and quality of geospatial data is vital for providing a common operational picture for crisis management,” said Mrs Ingrid Vanden Berghe, President of EuroGeographics.

“Our members fulfill a unique role by creating, managing and maintaining official sources of definitive and detailed map and land information. Many already provide advice and support to their national governments regarding mapping for emergencies. They are delighted that their data will continue to be at the heart of the Copernicus Emergency Mapping service which benefits people right across Europe.”

Hans Bruyninckx, Executive Director, EEA said: “When working in the aftermath of crises such as floods, storms, earthquakes or industrial accidents, emergency response teams need rapid access to the most up-to-date geospatial data.”

“This agreement is extremely important as it brings together authoritative information from official sources to quickly produce emergency response maps. Civil protection agencies, national and local emergency services, humanitarian aid organisations and European Union bodies will all benefit from the renewal of this agreement with EuroGeographics’ members.”

The Copernicus Emergency Mapping Service can be activated on any day and produces mapping products to support the different phases of emergency response inside and outside Europe.

It is provided free of charge in rapid mode for emergency management activities, which require immediate response, and risk and recovery mode, supporting emergency management activities. The service is activated by authorised users including national authorities in the EU countries or EU bodies responsible for the coordination of emergency management activities in the respective country.

For more information, visit http://copernicus.eu.

EuroGeographics

EuroGeographics is an international not-for-profit organisation (AISBL/ IVZW under Belgian Law. BCE registration: 833 607 112) and the membership association for the European National Mapping, Cadastre and Land Registry Authorities. It currently brings together 61 members from 46 countries.

To find out more about EuroGeographics, please visit www.eurogeographics.org.

Five years ago, when Skybox and Planet announced plans to image the Earth with unprecedented revisits, many observers wondered what data applications would be unlocked by these new platforms.

Back then, the industry standard in satellite Earth Observation (EO) was the positioning of large satellites that provided high quality images at high prices for lucrative government and defense markets at relatively low revisit rates. Fast-forward to 2016—thanks to the emergence of Big Data analytics, these same people are left wondering what applications can these small satellite platforms unlock that would help the industry make a giant leap forward.

NSR’s Satellite-based Earth Observation, 8th Edition report brought the first forecast for Big Data from EO images, projecting a cumulative revenue opportunity of $6 billion over the next ten years. Big Data analytics provides the satellite EO industry with means to engage with customers with more insight and NSR expects Services, Defense & Intelligence, and Managed Living Resources verticals to be the biggest vertical markets for these satellites.

The success of Big Data analytics in the satellite EO industry will be defined by volume and the velocity of the data, which can be achieved by adding more sensors in orbit, and more so by the variety and veracity of the datasets being consumed to build the final product. For a single satellite operator to provide all these ‘4 Vs’ required for the EO Big Data business is not cost effective—this is where EO data aggregators, such as CloudEO and PlanetOS, come into picture, in particular to add the required data variety and veracity.

Emerging companies in this space—such as Orbital Insight, RSMetrics, and Descartes Labs—have developed interesting analytics products such as indices that provide information on retail store traffic, global oil storage and agricultural yield. Such innovative products also call for business model innovations, as their customers (mainly the Wall Street hedge funds, commodity traders, and investors) are more concerned about the depth of information that can be derived from these indices rather than the petabytes or exabytes of pixels that have been used to arrive at those trends, for driving data-based interventions in their business processes. Satellite operators such as DigitalGlobe, MDA Geospatial, Airbus Defense & Space and Planet have been quick to jump on this new wave of EO Big Data analytics through industry partnerships that helps them access markets otherwise difficult to crack by traditional means of selling satellite EO data.

The promise of EO Big Data is massive, but getting into this business is not going to be an easy task—scaling up requires large investments in infrastructure for storage, computation and acquisition of data. NSR believes the success of this emerging industry will be driven by large organizations who can run parallel software on thousands of servers as well as by small firms through collaboration around a distributed ecosystem of ‘small data analytics,’ or what NSR designates as Information Products.

Boutique firms such as SatSure are aiming to become players in the global EO Big Data world by taking this ‘small data’ route and focusing only on one market (agriculture in this case), making use of the freely available datasets through various government programs like the Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS, and EUMETSAT, while partnering with giants like ESRI and SAP to gain customer access by using the visualization layer of these established platforms and integrating with their technology stack as the corresponding data layer.

Growth in EO Big Data analytics has the potential to make use of the impending oversupply situation facing the EO satellite data market, largely owing to a flurry of mega-constellations coming online. NSR observed new markets warming up to the potential of geospatial services, such as the recent announcement by the e-commerce giant Alibaba from China that plans to use EO for monitoring vegetables and getting better harvest. The fact they want to launch a satellite instead of using existing and upcoming satellite data leads NSR to believe the EO industry is faltering in ‘ground-up’ market development, especially in Asia where revenue is predicted to be a fifth of the global EO Big Data analytics market size by 2025, making new investments in the space segment a risky proposition as supply continues to outpace demand.

NSR expects the EO Big Data industry to play a large role in democratizing satellite image-based insight; however, caution must be exercised in trying to develop this emerging market by understanding well the underlying economics of this segment. NSR sees collaboration, either through partnerships or M&A, as the way forward for the EO Big Data industry. The recent acquisitions (The Weather Company by IBM, OpenWhere by BlackSky Global) follows a trend started by Google when that company purchased Terra Bella for $500 million and sowed the seeds of cross-industry consolidation. Such an acquisition might have been a small step for Google, but that acquisition could turn out to be a giant leap for the satellite EO industry.

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Paris: 163 satellites (>50kg) were launched for civil and commercial Earth observation (excluding meteorology) over 2006-2015, said Euroconsult Managing Director Adam Keith. According to the 9th edition of Euroconsult’s report, Satellite-Based Earth Observation: Market Prospects to 2025, which will be released soon these satellites were launched for entities in 35 countries and generated $18.4 billion in manufacturing market revenues. Most of these satellites were launched by government operators to support policy objectives spanning climate change, sustainable development and industrial support. In addition, EO remains the primary application for emerging space programs; growing funding into these programs is a key driver for overall investment growth. In 2015 civil government investment topped $10 billion for the first time.


“The EO industry is going through a significant supply increase. Over the next decade, 419 satellites are expected to be launched generating $35.5 billion in manufacturing revenues,” said Adam Keith. “Significant growth in the number of commercial satellites launched in constellation is expected. When the number of satellites <50kg (such as the Planet and Spire constellations) are added, the number of supply solutions expands even further. As supply will increase faster than the demand for commercial data and services, some price pressure is expected to result. As well, operators will need to better differentiate themselves in the market place as to the capabilities of their respective systems.”

The value-added services market reached $3.2 billion in 2015, and is growing at a faster rate than the data market alone (11% 5-year CAGR). Key markets for value-adding services do not mirror those for commercial data sales. Defense, while representing 61% of the commercial data market, represents only 15% of the VAS market; conversely, infrastructure projects (such as cartography, cadaster, etc.) is only 10% of the commercial data market, but 33% of the value-added market. The reasoning for this is relatively straightforward; defense end-users purchase data with much value-added analytics performed in-house. On the other hand, lower-cost, coarser resolution and geolocation accuracy data can be leveraged with value-adding to form higher value products and services. This approach is expected in emerging location-based applications – the focus of upcoming satellite constellations. While the data may be lower-cost, it will be able to build applications based on high frequency change detection with the focus on the product or service delivery over purely data sales.

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Richmond, BC – MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (“MDA” or the “Company”) (TSX: MDA), a global communications and information company, today announced that it has signed a contract with Orbital Insight, Inc., a geospatial big data company that provides advanced information solutions obtained by analyzing millions of satellite images at a time. MDA will provide RADARSAT-2 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) information for integration into Orbital Insight’s business intelligence services and products to enhance their analytics. MDA’s RADARSAT-2 provides valuable change detection information to enhance pattern-of-life analysis over areas of high activity. In combination with Orbital Insight’s data analytics capabilities, the RADARSAT-2 information will be used to monitor a variety of economic and industrial activity around the world.

The RADARSAT-2 satellite has global high-resolution surveillance capabilities that include a large collection capacity and high accuracy data acquisition. The satellite acquires data regardless of light or weather condition, and provides frequent re-visit imaging options. The information provided is ideally suited to markets that require either broad-area monitoring or targeted surveillance, such as defence and security, land use management, agriculture, disaster management, and natural resources.

David Belton, MDA’s manager responsible for this business said, “MDA has over 20 years of experience providing cost effective, accurate SAR information to many industries. We are excited to see what Orbital Insight’s deep learning and data analytics models will discover and what new applications and markets will be unlocked for RADARSAT-2.”

SAR imagery has the potential to unearth a wealth of new insight that optical imagery cannot,” said James Crawford, CEO of Orbital Insight. “This deal with MDA marks the first time deep learning convolutional neural networks will be applied to SAR, opening up the market for commercial SAR applications, which is expected to provide global opportunities for future growth over the next five years.”

About MDA

MDA is a global communications and information company providing operational solutions to commercial and government organizations worldwide.

MDA’s business is focused on markets and customers with strong repeat business potential, primarily in the Communications sector and the Surveillance and Intelligence sector. In addition, the Company conducts a significant amount of advanced technology development.

MDA’s established global customer base is served by more than 4,800 employees operating from 13 locations in the United States, Canada, and internationally.

The Company’s common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol “MDA.”

www.mdacorporation.com
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