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The African Regional Data Cube has been launched at the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data’s inaugural Data for Development Festival in the United Kingdom. This new tool harnesses the latest Earth observation and satellite technology to help Kenya, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Tanzania address food security as well as issues relating to agriculture, deforestation, and water access. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellite (CEOS) in partnership with the Group on Earth Observations, Amazon Web Services, and Strathmore University in Kenya developed the data cube.

Data Cube example. Photo: Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data

While satellite data is not new, it has traditionally been difficult to access and use, limiting its potential to help governments meet key development challenges. This new tool will help governments, farmers, and consumers manage the complex challenges they face in trying to navigate the economic, social, and environmental systems on which they depend. Vast quantities of freely available satellite data offer real opportunity to improve agricultural production, food security, and access to water.

The Deputy President of Kenya, H.E. William Ruto said his government will use the data cube to underpin the success of food security, a pillar of its “Big Four” priorities alongside manufacturing, universal healthcare, and affordable housing. The data cube will allow the government to understand crop distribution, changing seasons, and use of agricultural land in rural areas; as well as better protect its forests and water towers. T“This technology will help us understand month by month how our land is being used so that we can target interventions aimed at improving our actions against climate change, help smallholder farmers, and secure sustainable food and water for our citizens,” said Ruto.

“These five countries are in the vanguard of data for sustainable development. With their example, we hope that we can broaden access to the data cube across the continent,” said Claire Melamed, CEO of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. “The sky really is the limit when it comes to how data from satellites can help drive sustainable development.”

Government ministries, national statistical agencies, geographic institutes, research scientists, and civil society all stand to benefit from this new technology and training and capacity building will soon commence across countries to help national representatives utilize, contribute to, and ultimately benefit from the data cube.

“Over half of our labor force is made up of agricultural labor. This innovation has the potential to boost our economy, help enhance agricultural production and our efforts to tackle malnutrition in Ghana,” Mahamudu Bawumia, vice president of Ghana.

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Radiant Solutions has signed a follow-on contract with the Army Geospatial Center (AGC) valued at $2.6 million for its Remote Ground Terminal (RGT) program. AGC exercised an option extending Radiant Solutions’ provision of systems engineering and software development to enhance the RGT program, which mission is to provide timely access to high resolution commercial imagery for the military and humanitarian aid/disaster relief.

U.S. Army geospatial engineers prepare maps for a humanitarian mission in Liberia, where the Army is assisting in Ebola outbreak relief efforts.Photo: U.S. Army.

Developed by Radiant Solutions in partnership with AGC, the RGT is a transportable ground receiving and processing solution for commercial satellite remote sensing data, receiving both optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. According to Radiant Solutions, RGT provides the high performance of larger systems but in a compact package that can be delivered in-theatre by air or land. This capability allows the U.S. Army to access timely geospatial data from multiple sources in locations with limited infrastructure anywhere in the world and within hours of an event.

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Competition set to culminate in conference and awards ceremony on 05 June 2018 in Berlin

The winners of the INNOspace Masters competition will be announced at a festive awards ceremony, which is scheduled to take place on 05 June 2018 in Berlin alongside a conference devoted to the competition’s theme, “Space Moves!”.

When: 05 June 2018
Where: Humboldt Carré, Behrenstraße 42, 10117 Berlin
What: Networking, innovation tracking and leading “Space Moves!” representatives from politics and business,
The latest trends in technology transfer, innovative solutions and new business models

While the conference and awards ceremony are free to attend, those interested are asked to register as soon as possible as the number of participants is limited.

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New Space movement in Europe ramps up with the aim of improving access to crucial satellite imaging data

In this preliminary flood analysis exercise image, ICEYE has combined and processed ESA’s Sentinel-1 satellite data with ICEYE-X1 satellite data to visualize potential change detection capabilities. The image features Seine river and Orly, Paris airport at the start of the year 2018. (PRNewsfoto/ICEYE)

ICEYE, a New Space satellite manufacturer active in synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) technology, today announced a cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) to mutually explore opportunities provided by ICEYE’s technology. By using ICEYE’s SAR satellite technology and imagery, this new agreement demonstrates ESA’s interest in taking advantage of recent innovative New Space developments to foster business.

The cooperation encompasses activities that focus the design of the ICEYE microsatellite and its X-band SAR instrument, as well as identifying the most promising applications for the data collected by such a microsatellite constellation.

“The collaboration with ICEYE in this endeavour is helping us move distinct steps closer to our goals as we explore the potential in the New Space industry,” said ESA’s Director of Earth Observation, Josef Aschbacher.

By empowering ESA with ICEYE data, the constellation is helping to shape the future of observing our planet from space. Data collected by ICEYE benefits both researchers and a wide range of commercial industries. Challenging issues such as natural disaster response and climate change research, oil spill and illegal fishing detection all require repeated and timely imaging, regardless of the weather conditions or time of day. This shared effort to gain vast SAR imaging capabilities from new technological developments impacts the whole Earth observation industry and its end users.

“ICEYE’s successful first SAR mission, ICEYE-X1, and the forward-looking response to New Space from ESA have given rise to an extraordinary opportunity to push forward together,” said Rafal Modrzewski, CEO and co-founder of ICEYE.

ICEYE recently announced collaborations with two other European entities, Kongsberg Satellite Service (KSAT) and Aker Arctic, to collect and provide SAR data for maritime and ice monitoring. ICEYE remains on track to launch its next two SAR-enabled satellites, ICEYE-X2 and ICEYE-X3, later this year.

About ICEYE
ICEYE aims to provide democratised access to reliable Earth observation data through developing efficient Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors and microsatellites, enabling better decision to be made. Through an imaging service available around the globe, anytime, and with revisit times of just few hours, ICEYE helps clients resolve challenges in sectors such as maritime, disaster management and security and intelligence. ICEYE is the first organisation in the world to launch SAR microsatellites. For more information, please visit: www.iceye.com.

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The Airbus-operated SpaceDataHighway has begun regularly relaying data from the Sentinel-2A satellite, after the successful end of the commissioning period. This marks the start of the SpaceDataHighway service using all four Copernicus Sentinel satellites and the beginning of a new era for space-based imagery users.

The relay satellites are designed to lock on to low-orbiting satellites via laser and collect their data as they travel thousands of kilometres below, scanning Earth. SpaceDataHighway then immediately sends the collected data down to Europe from its higher position hovering in geostationary orbit, acting as a go-between.

The first two sets of Earth-observing Copernicus Sentinels-1A and -1B and -2A and -2B are signed up to this service as SpaceDataHighway’s anchor customers under an agreement between the European Union and the European Space Agency (ESA) as owners of the Copernicus programme, and Airbus as the owner and commercial operator of SpaceDataHighway.

Since using the SpaceDataHighway, the Sentinel-1 constellation has increased the amount of data it produces by about 50%. The service is also able to bring operational added-value to Sentinel-1 users by greatly improving the data timeliness for observations outside Europe. This is an important asset for users, especially when it comes to the routine monitoring of remote areas in the domain of maritime applications or assessment of natural disasters and first line response for emergency.

The SpaceDataHighway is the world’s first “optical fibre in the sky” based on cutting-edge laser technology. It will be a unique system of satellites permanently fixed over a network of ground stations, with the first – EDRS-A – already in space. Each day, it can relay up to 40 terabytes of data acquired by observation satellites, UAVs and manned aircraft, at a rate of 1.8 Gbit/s.

The relay satellites are designed to lock on to low-orbiting satellites via laser and collect their data as they travel thousands of kilometres below, scanning Earth. SpaceDataHighway then immediately sends the collected data down to Europe from its higher position hovering in geostationary orbit, acting as a go-between.

This process allows the lower satellites to continuously downlink the information they are gathering, instead of having to store it until they travel over their own ground station. That way, they can send down more data, more quickly.

The SpaceDataHighway is a public-private partnership between ESA and Airbus, with the laser terminals developed by Tesat-Spacecom and the DLR German Space Administration. EDRS-A, the first SpaceDataHighway relay satellite launched in January 2016, offers coverage from the American East Coast to India.

A second satellite will be launched in 2018. It will double the system’s capacity and extend the coverage and redundancy of the system. Airbus is willing to expand the SpaceDataHighway with a third node, ERDS-D, to be positioned over the Asia-Pacific region.

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With an unmatched 10-meter resolution at the global scale, PlanetSAT Global #2018 mosaic provides accurate geographic information for any part of the world. Users benefit from a seamless view of the Earth in high quality natural colors, for an enhanced visual experience!

PlanetObserver has selected best available multi-source data to process version #2018 of PlanetSAT Global mosaic. Very recent Sentinel-2 imagery at 10 meter resolution is used to update all largest urban areas across the world and all capital cities. Continents are updated with new Landsat 8 imagery. All our imagery is color-corrected, optimized and ready-to-use in different professional formats.

PlanetSAT Global #2018 mosaic will continue to bring great value to our users across different industries. The mosaic is easy to use in many military, commercial and consumer applications for visualization and simulation solutions, aircraft simulators, geo-intelligence solutions, web-mapping apps, to broadcast and weather graphics systems.

“With PlanetSAT Global Version #2018, we offer a completely improved product with higher spatial resolution and more recent imagery. On top of that, users save time with ready-to-use imagery, easy to implement in their solutions”, said Laurent Masselot, CEO of PlanetObserver
To find out more about PlanetSAT Global imagery basemap , visit PlanetObserver website at www.planetobserver.com.

For a food secure world, agriculture needs to get digital, i.e. we need “smart” agriculture to ensure food for all. Combining and analyzing this “Big Data” sets to monitor agriculture is key for a sustainable future.

The Copernicus Programme is a cornerstone of the EU’s effort to monitor the Earth and provides tremendous amount of data available on a full free and open basis. This amount of data is causing a paradigm shift in the remote sensing community. No longer is the data being brought to the user but the user and his/her knowledge is brought to the data. It is our goal to develop innovative and user-friendly platforms as an answer to this Big Data Challenge we are all facing. ESA’s Thematic Exploitation Platform on Food Security (TEP-FS) is a potential solution.

NO PLANET B! NO PLAN B!

SDG nr2: End Hunger, Achieve Food Security and Improved Nutrition and promote Sustainable agriculture is high on the worlds agenda. At the One Planet Summit earlier this week we were once again faced with the hard facts. We only have one planet. One planet to provide everything we need to grow food and live healthy lives.

With a growing global population food production will need to increase in a sustainable way by at least 70% by 2030. Food production systems will need to optimize the use of water, energy and fertilizers, reduce pollution and soil degradation, and at the same time maximize high quality agricultural yields under increasingly unstable environmental conditions.

ESA’S TEP-FS PLATFORM
It is clear that, to monitor and track this progress a Big Data is needed. Earth observation data has an important role to play here, but EO data alone is not enough. To provide correct information you also need other data e.g. meteo data, soil data, etc.

The challenge is to combine all this data and make it available. That’s why ESA created the Thematic Exploitation Platforms (ESA-TEPs) of which the TEP-Food Security (TEP-FS) is one. The TEP-FS provides services and applications through a user driven online platform. where the full power of Copernicus Sentinel-1 and -2 satellites as well as additional datasets are required.

Via this platform users can:
- Access the Copernicus Sentinel data;
- Process data on a cloud platform;
- Download information products.

The TEP-FS platform is a federation of public cloud infrastructures where the full Sentinel archive is available as well as the PROBA-V MEP platform which offers state-of-the-art data analytics capabilities on time series.
Click here to find out how the PROBA-V MEP platform brings you closer to the data.

AN INTERFACE BASED ON THE NEEDS OF EXPERT USERS

The platforms has different levels of engagement to the users.

– Free & open interface
For experts users there is a free and open interface that serves as the entry point to the functionality of the platform including fast and easy access to satellite and ancillary data as well as the tools to explore, analyse and process these datasets.

– Mobile friendly
The second level of user engagement is a Viewer. This will allow the on-site visualization of EO information products and their time series via smartphone and is designed for easy and intuitive use.

– Customized and confidential data management
Third level will provide additional, user-adapted information and interfaces for the monitoring and management farms as well as confidential data management in a secure environment. In order to demonstrate the platform’s ability service pilots are implemented: two on agriculture in Europe and Africa, one on aquaculture in Africa.

WATCHITGROW (WIG) EXPANSION

The first pilot includes crop monitoring and the derivation of advanced biophysical parameters and yield predictions to increase efficiency of agricultural production on farm level in Europe and Africa.

In support of the Belgian potato industry, VITO Remote Sensing already developed the WatchItGrow application where all processing is done at our data centre. WatchItGrow is an online monitoring tool for everyone in the potato value chain aimed to increase the production in a sustainable way. WatchItGrow is pointed as a demonstrator (pilot) of the strength of the platform and cloud computing behind the TEP-FS. The Belgian application is being expanded to the Netherlands, demonstrating the scalability of this kind of services making use of federated platform and processing on the public cloud.

Discover more about WatchItGrow in our previous blog WatchItGrow ® for the future of the Belgian potato chain.

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A broadband radiometer instrument, designed and built in the UK with the aim of improving our understanding of the Earth’s climate, has been delivered to the EarthCARE mission team in Germany.

The broadband radiometer (BBR) is a scientific instrument for the Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer (EarthCARE) satellite. It is a cutting-edge piece of engineering that will use three telescopes looking in three directions at once to study the radiance at the top of the atmosphere for better weather prediction. It will look at the relationship between clouds, aerosols and radiation and their combined effects on the Earth’s climate system.

This is the latest step towards completing the European Space Agency’s most complex Earth observation satellite.

Design, construction and testing of the BBR was led by Thales Alenia Space in the United Kingdom. RAL Space provided the thermal design for the telescope assembly as well as the optical, mechanical and electrical design for the whole instrument. Also, the majority of environmental testing, functional testing and instrument calibration was also performed at RAL Space facilities.

Dr Chris Mutlow, director of RAL Space said, “The BBR is an innovative and complex piece of engineering. I’m delighted that it’s now ready to be integrated with the EarthCARE spacecraft and look forward to the impact its observations will have on our ability to model and understand the processes involved in climate change.”

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Both large full size satellites as well as small satellites are now being used for various purposes around the globe. In addition, constellations of satellites are being developed for specific purposes, such as internet satellites. We also include here maritime surveillance that relies on Satellite Automatic Identification System (AIS) payload.

We queried a number of providers of both full size and small satellites as well as AIS to get an idea of what was available in the market.

Large Full-Size Satellites

European Space Imaging’s Robert Philipp. technical project manager on the Customer Support team, does a lot of work developing automated software for handling very high-resolution imagery with DigitalGlobe, MDA, and Space Imaging Middle East. He previously worked for Planet as a senior satellite data processing engineer and system operator.

“At European Space Imaging we are working with traditional full-sized satellites with a mass between 2000kg and 3000kg,” said Philipp.

While the company provides access to imagery from full-sized satellites, Philipp could speak to the pros and cons of small satellites also.

Pros:

-“The launch cost decreases significantly with decreasing satellite size. It is possible to bring them into orbit as secondary rocket payload and even launch several at once per launch. The record here is 88 sats in one launch.

- Production cost of a satellite decrease. As with decreasing size, the complexity of a satellite platform decreases as well and the cost of one satellite decreases.

-The development cycle can be shortened significantly. As with decreasing size, the complexity of a satellite platform decreases as well and it does not take that long to develop a successor to a satellite platform. Can even be shortened to several weeks.

-The temporal resolution increases due to the fact that the smaller a satellite becomes, they are sent into orbit as constellations more often and can, in the Earth Observation Business, acquire data over the same area more frequently.

-Redundancy. If a Nanosat goes out of order, there are very likely dozens of others still functioning properly in the same constellation. If a launch fails, the loss is not as significant as with full sized satellites.

Cons:

- Due to size limitations, the complexity and performance of a small sats is much less compared to full sized platforms.

-Reliability goes down with decreasing size. Redundant parts within the platform are excluded to keep costs low and due to size limitations and energy supply limitations. Developing a Nanosat becomes more and more function follows form approach.

-The life expectancy is less. Due to less fuel, or even the lack of, stable orbits cannot be maintained as long. Also the smaller batteries do have less life expectancies.

-Energy generation is limited due to smaller solar panels.

- Operation of huge fleets of satellites becomes too complex for manual operation and automated processes have to be implemented. Developing all these processes and systems takes time. If the developing cycle is too fast, it is hard to keep up with the development of the operating systems.

-Huge amount of redundant data gets acquired and has to be stored somewhere. So a lot more storage space is needed.”

When asked what types of tasks would be best addressed by large and small satellites, Philipps said: “High Resolution, Multispectral, Hyperspectral and RADAR observation satellites should be left for larger platforms. As well as Relay satellite platforms. Low or Medium resolution monitoring sats can be smaller. And communication sats can even be smaller.”

For the future of satellites in general, ESI sees a combination of larger satellites for RADAR, high resolution multi- or hyper-spectral earth observation combined with small satellites acquiring medium resolution data in the visible spectrum. Both will be sending their data through large relay sats.

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GISCafe Special Coverage: The World of State-of-the-Art Satellites, Reusable Spacecraft and More
March 15th, 2018 by Susan Smith

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Both large full size satellites as well as small satellites are now being used for various purposes around the globe. In addition, constellations of satellites are being developed for specific purposes, such as internet satellites. We also include here maritime surveillance that relies on Satellite Automatic Identification System (AIS) payload.

Hamburg Port Rathaus, European Space Imaging

We queried a number of providers of both full size and small satellites as well as AIS to get an idea of what was available in the market.

Large Full-Size Satellites

European Space Imaging’s Robert Philipp. technical project manager on the Customer Support team, does a lot of work developing automated software for handling very high-resolution imagery with DigitalGlobe, MDA, and Space Imaging Middle East. He previously worked for Planet as a senior satellite data processing engineer and system operator.

“At European Space Imaging we are working with traditional full-sized satellites with a mass between 2000kg and 3000kg,” said Philipp.

While the company provides access to imagery from full-sized satellites, Philipp could speak to the pros and cons of small satellites also.

Pros:

“The launch cost decreases significantly with decreasing satellite size. It is possible to bring them into orbit as secondary rocket payload and even launch several at once per launch. The record here is 88 sats in one launch.
Production cost of a satellite decrease. As with decreasing size, the complexity of a satellite platform decreases as well and the cost of one satellite decreases.
The development cycle can be shortened significantly. As with decreasing size, the complexity of a satellite platform decreases as well and it does not take that long to develop a successor to a satellite platform. Can even be shortened to several weeks.
The temporal resolution increases due to the fact that the smaller a satellite becomes, they are sent into orbit as constellations more often and can, in the Earth Observation Business, acquire data over the same area more frequently.
Redundancy. If a Nanosat goes out of order, there are very likely dozens of others still functioning properly in the same constellation. If a launch fails, the loss is not as significant as with full sized satellites.
Cons:

Due to size limitations, the complexity and performance of a small sats is much less compared to full sized platforms.
Reliability goes down with decreasing size. Redundant parts within the platform are excluded to keep costs low and due to size limitations and energy supply limitations. Developing a Nanosat becomes more and more function follows form approach.
The life expectancy is less. Due to less fuel, or even the lack of, stable orbits cannot be maintained as long. Also the smaller batteries do have less life expectancies.
Energy generation is limited due to smaller solar panels.
Operation of huge fleets of satellites becomes too complex for manual operation and automated processes have to be implemented. Developing all these processes and systems takes time. If the developing cycle is too fast, it is hard to keep up with the development of the operating systems.
Huge amount of redundant data gets acquired and has to be stored somewhere. So a lot more storage space is needed.”
When asked what types of tasks would be best addressed by large and small satellites, Philipps said: “High Resolution, Multispectral, Hyperspectral and RADAR observation satellites should be left for larger platforms. As well as Relay satellite platforms. Low or Medium resolution monitoring sats can be smaller. And communication sats can even be smaller.”

For the future of satellites in general, ESI sees a combination of larger satellites for RADAR, high resolution multi- or hyper-spectral earth observation combined with small satellites acquiring medium resolution data in the visible spectrum. Both will be sending their data through large relay sats.

Afrin, Syria devastation European Space Imaging

Recently European Space Imaging supplied imaging to show more than half of an ancient temple near the town of Afrin, Syria that had been reduced to rubble most likely by a Turkish airstrike. 30 cm resolution image of the temple at Ain Dara was captured by DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 satellite on January 29th. The American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives (ASOR) analyzed the data to confirm the extent of the damage. By comparing it with on-the-ground reports they were able to verify that an incident had taken place, and the exact parts of the temple that were damaged.

The Ain Dara temple is more than 3,000 years old and contains many stone sculptures of lions and sphinxes. Culturally the damage to the temple represents a devastating loss to the history of Syria.

“Interestingly, we captured a 50 cm resolution image on the very same day, but the 30 cm picture shows the destruction much more clearly,” said Adrian Zevenbergen, managing director of European Space Imaging. “This highlights how critical that extra resolution is for gaining a proper understanding of what happened here.”

By comparing satellite imagery collected over recent weeks the ASOR investigators were able to conclude that the incident most likely took place between January 20 and January 22.

In a similar case, very high resolution satellite imagery was used to ascertain the timeline and extent of damage to Iraqi heritage sites by ISIS in 2015, at Hatra and Nimrud. A European Space Imaging case study outlines that story.

In the arena of large satellites, Rocket Lab has successfully reached orbit with the test flight of its second Electron orbital launch vehicle, Still Testing. Electron lifted-off from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand recently.

Rocket Lab’s Electron Still Testing launch vehicle lifts off from Launch Complex 1. (Photo: Business Wire)

Following successful first and second stage burns, Electron reached orbit and deployed customer payloads at 8 minutes and 31 seconds after lift-off.

“Today marks the beginning of a new era in commercial access to space. We’re thrilled to reach this milestone so quickly after our first test launch,” says Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck. “Our incredibly dedicated and talented team have worked tirelessly to develop, build and launch Electron. I’m immensely proud of what they have achieved today.”

“Reaching orbit on a second test flight is significant on its own, but successfully deploying customer payloads so early in a new rocket program is almost unprecedented. Rocket Lab was founded on the principal of opening access to space to better understand our planet and improve life on it. Today we took a significant step towards that,” he says.

The data from this launch will be used to inform future launches, according to Rocket Lab engineers. Rocket Lab currently has five Electron vehicles in production, with the next launch expected to take place in early 2018. At full production, Rocket Lab expects to launch more than 50 times a year, and is regulated to launch up to 120 times a year, more than any other commercial or government launch provider in history.

Still Testing was carrying a Dove Pioneer Earth-imaging satellite for launch customer Planet, as well as two Lemur-2 satellites for weather and ship tracking company Spire.

Rocket Lab’s commercial phase will see Electron fly already-signed customers including NASA, Spire, Planet, Moon Express and Spaceflight.

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The world’s first space-based system to help identify specific sources of greenhouse gas emissions is now circling the Earth.

The main unit in the network, an orbiter called the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (Tropomi), is a package of state-of-the-art sensors launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in October. By December, it had begun to map the plumes of methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and various aerosols over industrial facilities and cities as it passed over Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

Built to eventually map emissions planetwide every 24 hours and to show pollutants in higher resolution than ever before, Tropomi’s sharper images drew raves from its sponsors. Josef Aschbacher, director of ESA’s Earth observation programs, called it a “milestone for Europe“ and noted that it will be “valuable for helping to put appropriate mitigation policies in place.”

It may also prove to be a high-water mark for North America. Tropomi has been exchanging information with the owners of a second satellite, called Claire. It was launched in 2016 by GHGSat Inc., a Montreal-based company, to find leaking gases at sites like wellheads. Stephane Germain, the CEO, says that Claire’s sensors are miniaturized to fit into a package the size of a microwave oven. The orbiter, a silver rectangular box, has been using Tropomi’s information to home in on industrial facilities, such as oil and gas operations, to see if they have sprung methane leaks.

Tropomi can get its resolution down to about a square mile on Earth—a area that lets it see the emissions from a specific city. Germain saw a business opportunity there for Claire—named after a newborn child of one of his company’s engineers. Working with the Canadian Space Agency, GHGSat spent three years designing a satellite whose lightweight imaging spectrometer can focus on an area as small as 164 square feet. That should allow Claire to pinpoint the exact source of the leaking methane so the company can fix it.

Under a cap-and-trade system to reduce emissions, like the one in California and Quebec, the cost of methane leaks can add up. Refineries, pipelines and remote fields of oil and gas wellheads can be hard to monitor, but an orbiting satellite traveling over 4 miles per second can measure a facility’s emissions more cheaply, more accurately and more often.

By now, GHGSat says it has measured emissions from over 2,000 sites across the world.

“Primarily we want to serve industrial operations,” Germain explained in an interview, but his company is also interested in comparing measurement techniques with government regulators. He hopes one day the same emissions data will be available to everybody to inform policymaking.

SPRING A LEAK, AND BELLS RING

Ultimately, big industrial emitters will need “tiered systems” of sensors, Germain thinks. His company is preparing to launch two more satellites and is developing sensor packages that can be carried by aircraft, along with ground-based emissions sensors to monitor large industrial complexes.

Those efforts have attracted a potential U.S. competitor, Bluefield Technologies of Palo Alto, Calif. Its CEO, Yotam Ariel, has formed a team of scientists and engineers who are designing a satellite the size of a backpack to spot the distinctive patterns of sunlight that is reflected from small emissions of methane on Earth. Bluefield is one of many new companies taking advantage of new “CubeSats,” or tiny satellites that can make inexpensive measurements from space.

Bluefield is building its own list of clients and hopes to launch two satellites over the next two years. They will be miniaturized versions of what NASA has used for over 30 years. “It is not in space yet, but we have no doubts that the physics works,” said Ariel.

Ultimately, Ariel predicts that the government will outsource satellite monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions to private companies. “We’re providing a cost-effective way to do this globally and to have less of a debate on the data,” he said. He expects it will take five to seven years for a private satellite industry to fully form, but it would save businesses money.

He hopes to sell satellite data to investors in oil and gas companies, such as hedge funds, and to government agencies, environmental groups and insurance companies that might want to monitor a company’s progress in reducing emissions.

Ariel thinks landfills, cattle feeding operations, power plants and other producers of methane could be clients, too. “They [the client companies] have a new way to keep an eye on their infrastructure,” he said. If there is a problem, such as a methane leak, “it rings a bell and they can send someone out to fix that.”

REDUCE AND VERIFY

There may be a lot of bells ringing. The system now is a haphazard, on-the-ground monitoring network used to track greenhouse gases. In some parts of the world, it may be politically impossible. Yet the stakes are growing. In November, the World Bank announced that the value of global carbon pricing initiatives, such as California’s cap-and-trade system, is now $52 billion and growing by 7 percent each year.

This year, China may unveil its own emissions trading system, which could be the largest carbon pricing initiative in the world. But how it may develop and how it might be verified remain to be seen. Under California’s carbon system, a company is assigned a “cap” or a limit to its greenhouse gas emissions. Each metric ton of carbon must be covered by a permit. If a company reduces its emissions below the cap, it can sell excess permits for a profit. If it can’t or if it experiences, for example, long-term methane leaks, it may have to buy more permits and pay whatever price the market demands.

“The days are coming when we will have satellites in the sky that can monitor any facility on this planet,” said Rob Jackson, who heads Stanford University’s Earth system science department. “I’m quite excited about that. The environmental community will be able to watchdog any facility on Earth. I think everyone will benefit.”

Eric Kort, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan, said that “the scientific community is quite excited that the Tropomi information will be useful,” but he added that GHGSat has not released enough public information to convince him that Claire, its smaller, more precisely focused satellite, works.

“I hope that they get there, because I think it will be interesting. Tropomi has opened a new kind of window on the world,” Kort said. He noted that in January, NASA announced that it hopes to enlarge its data gathering on Earth’s emissions in the early 2020s, by launching a satellite it calls the Geostationary Carbon Observatory, or “GeoCarb.”

GeoCarb will be placed in a geostationary orbit that will allow it to travel at the same speed as the Earth’s rotation, giving it what NASA calls “wall to wall” focus on North and South America. That would allow it to make as many as 10 million daily observations. It will be the first U.S. satellite to measure methane plumes near Earth’s surface.

“Methane leakage from natural gas production costs U.S. industry $5 billion to $10 billion a year,” NASA noted, not quantifying the additional costs of artificially heating up the Earth’s atmosphere. According to the space agency, methane emissions are increasing annually. Most of it comes from fossil fuel production. A smaller increase comes from agricultural production, like rice farming. The third source—forest fires—has recently been decreasing, according to a new NASA study.

Steven Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, has spent years trying to find ways to quantify and reduce man-made methane emissions. He agrees that we’re rapidly moving into a new, more robust world of verifying emissions. Traditionally, the United States and other countries have used satellites to measure emissions in a general way, to be used in global climate models.

With Tropomi, which was primarily developed by the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Hamburg sees a new effort to map problematic emissions on Earth. That could help policymakers develop mitigation policies.

Business-driven ventures like GHGSat’s Claire satellite can give companies an accurate picture of their emissions—while also verifying their reductions. “We need both, and we’re seeing an emergence of technologies to do that, but we shouldn’t conflate them,” Hamburg said. “Together, they create the revolution.”

For him, the revolution will produce a new data set that’s seen and measured by multiple sources. It has to be trustworthy.

Hamburg sometimes imagines a new role for himself when and if the revolutionary moment arrives. “I’d like to walk up and say: ‘Well, that’s exciting, and now I’d like to see your data.’

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