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The recent launch of the new Sentinel satellites, part of the European Union’s ‘Copernicus’ Earth observation programme, has the potential to help farmers take precision agriculture to a new level, along with a host of other land monitoring uses.

Sentinel data will create a major opportunity for service providers, and can be applied within agri-tech.

Vladimir Stoiljkovic, Business Development Manager at the Satellite Applications Catapult, who will be attending the Agri-Tech East workshop “A Sense of Place – Geomatics Meets Soil Management”on 17th May, said: ’The integration of free satellite data sets from the Sentinel satellites with other datasets offers the potential for improved precision farming products and services.”

Sentinel is part of the Copernicus Earth observation programme, which includes six families of satellites, each with a different focus, and thousands of sensors in land, sea and air to help monitor our Earth. This satellite network provides data sources that could be used for precision farming, disease prediction or drought warning.

Stoiljkovic continues: “The European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites will provide high resolution optical, radar and altimetry data about land and sea temperatures. The most interesting for agri-tech is Sentinel 1 and 2, which will provide global land cover.”

Sentinel-1 offers radar imaging, which cuts through any cloud cover and can be used to monitor crop growth/health.

Although the data sets from the Sentinel satellites are free of charge, some of them require additional analysis to be useable, which creates a business opportunity for service providers.

“The issue with satellite imaging has been the resolution,” says Stoiljkovic. “Free data is available to 10m resolution but it is now possible to purchase data with a resolution of 31cm, which can be used to evaluate crop growth.

“Emerging technology has shown it is possible to identify the growth stage of crops this could be extremely valuable when timing of applying fertilisers and irrigation. We have found that some of the larger grower groups are employing satellite data analysts to create these types of models.”

The Agri-Tech East Special Interest Group meeting “A Sense of Place – Geomatics Meets Soil Management” on 17th May will provide technology developers with an opportunity to meet farmers and growers and understand better how to bring a geo-spatial focus to information gathering. There will also be discussion of how data from different sources could be integrated and what users would require from this.

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[Via Satellite 04-04-2016] UrtheCast has formed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to boost the operational effectiveness of the company’s upcoming OptiSAR constellation. The agreement enables the two organizations to collaborate on Research and Development (R&D) related to the primary areas of multi-source fusion, improving/ensuring metric accuracy, and optimizing collection and dissemination strategies.

UrtheCast is preparing a commercial constellation of multispectral optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Earth Observation (EO) satellites, which is now known as OptiSAR. The company plans 16 satellites — eight optical and eight SAR — flying in two orbital planes, with each plane consisting of four satellite pairs, equally-spaced around the orbital plane. Each pair of satellites will consist of a dual-mode, high-resolution optical satellite (video and pushbroom) and a dual-band high-resolution SAR satellite (X-band and L-band), flying in tandem.

This CRADA will allow UrtheCast to work closely with an experienced user and make early changes to its systems architecture, if deemed appropriate. The specific R&D under these areas will support UrtheCast’s government and commercial customer base. The company expects to deploy the OptiSAR constellation over multiple launches and to begin operations in 2020.

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Contribute to the EU Geospatial Business Outlook Report.

Geospatial Media and Communications is conducting a survey on European Geospatial Business Profile to understand the business profile of geospatial industry in Europe. The result of this survey shall be presented in European Geospatial Business Outlook Report that will be published in May 2016, and to be launched at the inaugural European Geospatial Business Summit, part of the programmes at Geospatial World Forum 2016 in the week of 23-26 May in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Link to the survey

A couple of weeks ago, the Cartosat-2C — built at Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad — has been dispatched to ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) at Bengaluru after successful rounds of tests and evaluation.

ISRO’s earth observation satellite Cartosat-2C will be launched in May using a PSLV rocket. It will prove to be a shot-in-the arm for India’s military surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. The launch will help place India in a select league of nations like US, Israel and China who have similar or better spy satellites that keep a close watch of happenings on Earth from space.

A couple of weeks ago, the Cartosat-2C — built at Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad — has been dispatched to ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) at Bengaluru after successful rounds of tests and evaluation. This brand new satellite follows the steps of Cartosat-2A which was India’s first dedicated military satellite, launched in 2007, that had the capability to monitor missile launches in its neighbourhood.

“Though little is known about this new satellite which has been built by scientists at SAC, it will be a follow-up mission in the Cartosat series and is expected to provide very high resolution pictures and videos captured from space,” an ISRO official said.

The 690-kilogram dual-use satellite is equipped with a Panchromatic Camera and a high-resolution multi-spectral instrument. This camera will have a resolution of 0.65 metres which is an improvement over the 0.8 metre camera sent on earlier missions. The new camera onboard the mission, can not only click high resolution pictures of disputed border and coastal areas, but can also record videos of sensitive targets from space, compress it, and relay it back to Earth.

ISRO officials describe this satellite “as one of the best eyes in space” that India has launched till date. The strength of the camera installed in this home-grown satellite is almost at par with the ones possessed by US and China. For instance, in 2014, the Chinese had set a remote sensing satellite “Yaogan 24” which had a similar camera of 0.65 metre resolution. The panchromatic imagers can not only be used for surveillance, but can also aid in disaster monitoring. It will also click images that can give an idea of temperatures of a particular location in comparison with the surrounding areas. Cartosat-2C is expected to be launched along with 21 other satellites in May using a PSLV rocket. It will be placed in a sun-synchronous polar orbit at a low-earth altitude of about 200-1,200 kms above the Earth’s surface.

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The industry has experienced an increase of free software programs for integrating data across different types of platforms and merging it with archival records from multiple private and government sources.

This change is shifting the industry’s economic center away from its pioneers rooted in the defense and intelligence segments of the aerospace industry and toward small entrepreneurially driven enterprises. While the cost of creating remote sensing products will fall from tens of dollars to as little as pennies expanded global demand will increase the value of the global business at a double-digit compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

BCC Research examines the remote sensing products in its report, Remote Sensing Technologies and Global Markets (IAS022E). Global market revenues should reach nearly $8.9 billion and $13.8 billion in 2016 and 2021, respectively, reflecting a five-year CAGR of 9.3%.

  • Gain information about the industry, with descriptions of important applications including weather forecasting, intelligence gathering, climate change, and public health
  • Understand how recent technological changes will alter the market
  • Learn about the major patents and remote sensing research programs
  • Review forecasts of remote sensing application areas and supporting data

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FRANKFURT • Europe has launched the first part of a new space “data highway” that will pave the way for faster monitoring of natural disasters like earthquakes and floods.

The first building block of the European Data Relay Satellite (EDRS), the EDRS-A node is a “big data highway” that costs nearly €500 million (S$785 million) and will harness new laser-based communications technology.

The EDRS will improve transmission of large amounts of data such as pictures and radar images from satellites in orbit to Earth because they will no longer have to wait for a ground station on Earth to come into view.

The EDRS-A node, riding piggyback on a Eutelsat communications satellite, was blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, on board a Proton rocket on Friday.

The node, which is to orbit Earth at an altitude of about 36,000km, houses a laser terminal that works much like an autonomous telescope capable of locking on to moving targets on Earth.

It will send data to and from Earth or between satellites at a rate of 1.8 gigabits a second, which is about the same as sending all the data that could be printed in a 1m-long shelf of books in one second, according to standard industry measures.

The EDRS will relay data on sea ice, oil spills or floods from Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation project to users in Europe, Africa and the Atlantic area, but its services will also be available to other paying customers.

The EDRS is a public-private partnership between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Airbus Defence and Space.

Pairing EDRS-A with the Eutelsat 9B satellite, which will beam TV images to Europe, cuts down on costs for both satellite operator Eutelsat and the ESA as they share the expenses of the launch and joint systems. A second satellite, EDRS-C, is to be launched in the middle of next year.

Eventually, others could follow, and they could also be coupled with commercial craft.

“We are open to pairing a third EDRS payload with a future Eutelsat satellite,” said Eutelsat chief technical officer Yohann Leroy.

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5th February 2016 By: Ilan Solomons. Monitoring abandoned mines and illegal mining activities using satellite imagery is now possible, says Hansjörg Eberle, director of Crosstech remediation services provider and subsidiary of the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action.

Crosstech, as part of the Swiss consortium that also includes software company Sarmap, with cofinancing from the European Space Agency (ESA), is aiming to demonstrate how this can be done through an applied research project. Eberle says such a system will be well suited to South Africa, which has serious difficulties with monitoring abandoned mines and illegal mining activities.

He adds that, as the mining sector is in the doldrums, abandoned and mothballed mining sites are likely to increase. “We are looking for partner organisations (government or commercial) that are willing to participate in a demonstration project, at no cost to them,” he tells Mining Weekly.

He notes that the research project forms part of the ESA’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) 20 Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme. The ARTES 20 IAP programme is dedicated to the development, implementation and pilot operations of integrated applications. These are applications that combine data from at least two existing and different space assets such as satellite communication, earth observation, satellite navigation and human spaceflight technologies.

“The ultimate aim of the programme is to bring a product or services to market,” Eberle states. He says several technologies have abundantly been described by researchers, but have not been incorporated into mainstream products or services. Eberle cites synthetic aperture radar, which can detect changes up to the millimetre by comparing images taken at different times, as an example. This technology can help to detect whether a dam has shifted over the years, whether there is erosion at tailings dams or whether the soil is moving through subsidence.

“Such tiny movements are often the precursors for bigger shifts, leading to major disasters, as we have recently seen with the dam break in Brazil.” Using the same technology also allows for tracing the history of an area for as long as satellite imagery is available (up to 20 years) and drawing conclusions based on the history of what has happened in the past, he adds.

Further, Eberle notes that a key driver of innovation is using satellite imagery, which is becoming increasingly available free of charge, such as the ESA’s series of Sentinel satellites. He points out that satellite imagery is becoming available more rapidly than in the past and, in some instances, updated satellite imagery can be generated on a monthly or weekly basis.

“This allows for monitoring and change detection in almost real time.” Eberle comments that such techniques will allow for the remote environmental monitoring of mining sites. Most mining companies and regulators continue to monitor sites by driving to and patrolling them or – in some cases – by planting sensors in some locations. While these methods might work for one site, it becomes inefficient and costly when dozens or hundreds of sites have to be monitored.

“We believe we can develop a monitoring system based on actual user requirements using these techniques. The end product could be regularly updated, with detailed risk maps for geologists and high-level risk maps with interpretation and plain language text for decision-makers . . . [which] will be available on the Internet,” he concludes.

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Information from the Copernicus Earth Observation programme, launched by the European Union and European Space Agency, is being used by Defra to improve understanding of our environment and better inform our work to manage it.

Following record December rainfall in the north of England, Sentinel-1, one of the first two orbiting satellites in the programme, was activated to support the emergency response by providing rapid data on flooded farms and helping with recovery efforts.

Six pilot research projects across Defra are also uncovering how satellite and Earth observation data can help improve water quality, increase biodiversity and manage our forests and woodland. One project will see the creation of ‘Living Maps’, plotting natural features such as grasslands, marshes and woodland so we can better manage nature, improve pollination and reduce erosion in areas that need it most.

The new data could also help us manage our agricultural landscapes and speed up payments to farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy.

Today Defra hosted an Earth Observation and Open Data event, which brought together academics, government and the private sector to explore future applications of this data.

Speaking ahead of the event, Environment Secretary Elizabeth Truss said: _“We’re already making great strides in using Earth observation data to help people and communities across the UK – the information was a vital part of our flood recovery efforts and will help us identify and restore farmland across the country.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg and we have an ambitious 25 year plan for our environment. By generating huge amounts of invaluable information on our natural environment, Earth observation can help us deliver this.“That is why today we have brought together some of the best brains in the business to explore how else we can harness this data to create a cleaner, healthier environment which benefits everyone and will help preserve it for future generations.”
The event follows the launch of the Earth Observation Roadmap last year, which Defra developed under the UK Space Agency’s ‘Space for Smarter Government Programme’ to make sure all policies are using satellite data to its full potential.”_

Elizabeth Truss added: “Data and smart ways of working should be at the heart of everything government does, which is why we’re working with experts in the field to realise the potential of Earth observation data. Not only will this help us deliver our priorities quickly and efficiently, but the benefits to our growing economy could be huge. The Copernicus programme will be investing €4.2 billion up to 2020 to provide new environmental data – if UK businesses get on board to use this data, creating innovative products and services, we could see new jobs created across the country.”

Catherine Mealing-Jones, Director of Growth at the UK Space Agency, said: “Today’s event showcases the vast potential of satellite data for use across government. Observing our Earth enhances our everyday lives, help departments save money and deliver better services for the taxpayer, as well as generating real returns for UK businesses. Our Space for Smarter Government Programme is proud to have supported Defra in reaching this point – together, we can recognise the potential space offers to help make a difference for our country. I hope this project inspires others across the public sector to think about how space can help them.”

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GEO-CRADLE brings together key players fully representing the Region of Interest (Balkans, N. Africa and M. East) and the complete EO value chain therein, with the overarching objective of establishing a multi-regional coordination network that will:

  • i. Support the effective integration of existing EO capacities (space/air-borne/in-situ monitoring networks, modelling and data exploitation skills, and past project experience),
  • ii. Provide the interface for the engagement of the complete ecosystem of EO stakeholders (scientists, service/data providers, end-users, governmental organisations, and decision makers),
  • iii. Promote the concrete uptake of EO services and data in response to regional needs, relevant to four thematic priorities: adaptation to climate change, improved food security, access to raw materials and energy)
  • iv. Contribute to the improved implementation of and participation in GEO, GEOSS, and Copernicus in the region.


The GEO-CRADLE ecosystem

In this context, GEO-CRADLE has started by inventorying the regional EO capacities and user needs, through targeted interviews with key actors in the region and through the dissemination of dedicated surveys. The findings of these activities will be combined within a gap analysis that will enable the definition of region specific (G)EO Maturity Indicators and common priority needs.

This will be followed by four feasibility studies, demonstrating how the regional priorities can be tackled by the GEO-CRADLE Network. In parallel, GEO-CRADLE will set up a Regional Data Hub, which abides by the GEOSS Data Sharing Principles and facilitates access to and dissemination of region-related data.

Finally, the project will elaborate a roadmap for the future implementation of GEOSS and Copernicus in the region, with the ultimate aim to enable sustainable exploitation of the regional infrastructures and capacities as well as informed decision-making.


The GEO-CRADLE work breakdown structure

More information can be found online at http://www.geocradle.eu/

Google has just announced that Skybox Imaging has been renamed Terra Bella. The new name is to intended to indicate a change of focus from just a satellite imaging company to pioneering the search for patterns of change in the physical world.

Google acquired Skybox Imaging back in June 2015. We have not seen Skybox imagery in Google Earth, mainly because it is lower resolution that than offered by Google’s usual imagery suppliers. Despite the lower resolution, Skybox has produced some interesting products over the years. We saw a gif animation of the Burning Man festival and in the same post you can see the first HD resolution video of Earth from space. We also had a look at Skybox’s image of the November 2014 Poppy display at the Tower of London. We love the Google Chrome extension “Earth View” and we noticed that it includes a few images from Skybox Imaging. In October 2014 Skybox announced the Skybox for Good programme which works with non-profits to provide fresh satellite imagery where they need it.

Terra Bella plans to launch a lot more satellites in the coming years and we hope to see great things from them in the future.

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