Skip to content

Space technology is more relevant to our everyday lives than we often think and the European Space Expo, a free, interactive exhibition, highlights exactly how space technology can improve life on planet Earth.

Between March 28 and April 5, the European Space Expo is coming to Athens after having been to 23 other European cities. An initiative of the European Commission, the Space Expo has already been visited by more than 500,000 Europeans, giving them the opportunity to get informed about the European space program and to discover the many applications that are used on earth for the benefit of European citizens.

Inside an impressive dome, at the heart of Athens, the Expo was inaugurated by Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis, who stressed that the accessible knowledge presented at the Expo shows how “feasible, concrete and recognizable in our everyday lives the many benefits of space applications.”

Aikaterini Kavvada, head of the Galileo and EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service) Units of the European Commission, explained how the European space policy is materialized through two primary initiatives.

Copernicus is an Earth observation program which systematically provides information in six areas: land, marine, atmosphere, climate change, emergency management and security. While Galileo is the first global infrastructure for satellite radio navigation and positioning through satellite that is designed for non-military purposes.

“Space technology allows us Europeans through political and economic independence to enhance our position as a major actor in the global arena, next to big countries and great nations which are also active in the field of space policy, such as the United States, Russia, China,” Kavvada said.

Kavvada, who has been working on Galileo for 16 years, presented one of the two satellite launches that had taken placed recently.

The satellite “Anastasia” is named after the 15-year-old Greek winner of the Galileo Space Drawing Competition, Anastasia Panagiotakopoulou, who was also present at the Expo’s opening ceremony on March 28. The painting depicts a laundry line starting from earth and ending in space, which according to Kavvada, “gives a clearly human dimension to the program and truly brings space to earth.”

Prof. Kanaris Tsinganos, president of the National Observatory of Athens, highlighted the role of Greece in the European Space activities.

“Greece is participating for the first time and with a central role in Proba 3, a system of two satellites that will go around earth and observe the solar atmosphere, and their electronics are produced by our teams here in Greece,” said Tsinganos.

The National Observatory of Athens, which won a Copernicus Masters award for its fire management system, will be the first station collecting, processing and disseminating data to the whole Southeastern Mediterranean, according to Tsinganos.

The current recession in Europe does not make space research less relevant, quite the contrary, experts said.

“On a European level, space policy has been recognized as one of the main pillars for growth,” said Eleftherios Mamais, an astrophysicist and representative of the Expo.

“We are talking about applications that help reduce costs and increase efficiency, for example free services like the ones that Galileo or EGNOS offer can be used by farmers in order to reduce pesticide use, to improve crop productivity, etc.,” said Mamais.

“In Brussels, we strongly believe that the funds spent constitute an investment for the future and the quality of life for contemporary as well as future European citizens,” said Kavvadas.

“We have seen that for every euro spent for Galileo or Copernicus, a multiple of this initial investment comes back to the European economy. If you analyze it, for every European citizen it costs less than a cinema ticket,” observed Mamais.

Source

Eurisy has been working with public authorities since the start of its User Programme, in 2007. Based on this work, we built the largest database of operational good practice examples in Europe. It is a collection of testimonials from public authorities and SMEs who use satellite services routinely. Over 100 examples are available online to inspire potential end-users to follow suit.

In January 2015, Eurisy took this research one step further by publishing a report analysing detailed information on the benefits, obstacles and lessons learned from 10 use cases.

In the upcoming months, this analysis will be extended via an online survey, currently available in nine languages. You are kindly invited to fill in the survey and to promote it!

In the meantime, Eurisy also continues to raise awareness and accompany potential users with many events and activities around Europe.

Find out more details in this newsletter, on our website and on our social media channels!

Stefaan De Mey, Eurisy Secretary General

The Center aims primarily at setting up leading edge integrated observational solutions to operate space-borne and ground- based monitoring networks in a complementary, unified and coordinated manner.

The research portfolio covers a broad spectrum of phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, extreme weather events, fires, fire smoke and toxic gasses, emission concentrations, manmade hazards, dust storms, air quality and impacts to human health.

The focus of BEYOND is to assemble technological expertise, know-how and research capacity to seamlessly design innovative processing chains, generate added-value products and develop end-to-end services for disaster management, environmental monitoring and climate change analyses, to serve institutional stakeholders, the scientific community, end-users and the general public, for the benefit of the environment and the society.

BEYOND WEB site

Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have commanded the 20-foot (6-meter) reflector antenna on NASA’s new Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory to begin spinning for the first time. The partial spin-up is a key step in commissioning the satellite in preparation for science operations

Mission controllers sent commands to release the locking mechanism that prevented the observatory’s spun instrument assembly – the part that spins – from rotating during launch and deployment of the reflector. The spun instrument assembly includes the spin control electronics, radiometer instrument and reflector antenna.

Ending March in the first step of a two-step procedure, the spun instrument assembly was spun up to its initial rate of five revolutions per minute (rpm), a process that took about a minute. Initial data indicate the partial antenna spin-up procedure went as planned.

Because of the large size (mass) of the spun instrument assembly and its relatively rapid angular acceleration during spin-up, SMAP’s spacecraft bus rotated in the opposite direction during this process to balance the angular momentum. It reached a peak rate of up to 11 degrees per second.

Once the spun instrument assembly spin rate stabilized at five rpm, the spacecraft’s reaction wheels quickly restored the spacecraft bus to a non-rotating, stable attitude. Onboard flight software then turned the observatory back to its science-gathering orientation, with the spin axis pointing straight down to the ground and SMAP’s solar array pointed toward the sun.

The observatory will remain in its current configuration with the spun instrument assembly rotating at five rpm for about three days to allow ground controllers to assess the observatory’s performance at this spin rate before proceeding to the next step. On March 26, after ground analysis of this first antenna spin-up step is completed, mission controllers plan to increase the antenna’s spin speed to its final rate of approximately 15 rpm.

The partial antenna spin-up follows a series of recent propulsive maneuvers by SMAP’s ground flight operations team to adjust the observatory to its final science orbit for mapping operations.

SMAP launched Jan. 31 on a minimum three-year mission to map global soil moisture and detect whether soils are frozen or thawed. The mission will help scientists understand the links in Earth’s water, energy and carbon cycles; help reduce uncertainties in predicting weather and climate; and enhance our ability to monitor and predict natural hazards such as floods and droughts

When fully spun up and collecting science data, SMAP’s antenna will measure a 620-mile-wide (1,000-kilometer) swath of the ground as it flies above Earth at an altitude of 426 miles (685 kilometers). This will allow SMAP to map the entire globe with high-resolution radar data every two to three days.

Source

Integrated monitoring solutions constitute a prerequisite towards risk mitigation and urban planning policies against soil subsidence and seismic motion, providing valuable knowledge and data for investigating the corresponding physical mechanisms.
The above concept lies between the main framework of actions of INDES-MUSA project aiming at the deployment of an innovative multi-sensor system for monitoring in a complementary manner ground deformation and seismic motion in subsidence-prone urban areas.

Impact

The combination of the project actions within the overall objectives of the project is expected to result in a well-documented and innovative Web-based pilot study for monitoring urban subsidence and seismic response in the selected sites towards an integrated product to end users for both urban hazard assessment studies and future development strategies in the context of an economic and risk mitigation benefit for the society. In this regard, the proposed advancement of a multi-sensor monitoring of natural hazards examined within the INDES-MUSA project, in conjunction to validated scientific results integrated in a Web-GIS platform, will provide a flexible template for future development of both institutional and commercial services with applicability over a broad range of potential market sectors in urban areas with similar risk mitigation needs. Additionally, the project is expected to have a direct benefit to the participating enterprises and research teams based on a profitable technical know-how or/and scientific personnel exchange between the two countries.

Concept

The main goal of the project is the establishment of integrated tools and models for large-scale multi-risk assessment in urbanized environments prone to ground subsidence and seismic action by means of innovative, multi-sensor and cost effective monitoring schemes. Risk and vulnerability of urban areas to the above natural hazards constitute an inherently spatial problem leading by definition to an emerging need for corresponding urban-scale and highly-accurate monitoring solutions that can be used by end users and decision-making policies for risk management, disaster preparedness, environmental resource management and urban planning in the future. The above concept becomes particularly valuable in the case of complex urban landscapes containing physically different typologies of residential structures, critical facilities and civil infrastructures. In this context, the INDES-MUSA project aims at providing readily available monitoring data in the form of spatial distribution models related to ground subsidence and seismic motion through a web GIS platform applied in properly selected urban sites in Greece and China respectively.

Lidar & Aerial flight

Technical Details

The Greek site under investigation is located in the region of Kalochori close to Thessaloniki port in North Greece, presenting great scientific and monitoring interest related to the examined natural hazards, thereby in agreement with the general objectives of the project.

The integrated nature of the monitoring scheme is provided by a combination of two Airborne Lidar Leica ALS60 missions for change detection purposes and production of an accurate 3D city model combined with the town planning data of the constructions in the urban, industrial, gas and oil tanks area next to the port, Airborne DMC frame camera RGBNIR data at 0.10 cm ortho production, mobile GNSS stations, a tide gauge and water level sensors for ground subsidence measurements complemented by permanent seven accelerographic and two GNSS stations for monitoring seismic motion. The above multi-sensor scheme is deployed as an innovative pilot study, based on available means, in properly selected urban site. Besides monitoring and data processing, soil subsidence and seismic motion are being investigated by means of pertinent methods of analysis that will be developed and adapted in an urban-scale sense aiming at a better understanding of the investigated hazard sources as affected by the urban environment.

Both recorded data and analysis predictions are integrated, combined and implemented towards the development of a research tool and they are made readily-available and accessible to the scientific community and local/national decision-making authorities through a properly designed Web GIS platform.


Study Area, Kalochori

Contact Info

  • Contact person : Betty Charalampopoulou
  • E-mail : mail@geosystems-hellas.gr
  • Participants in the project: GEOSYSTEMS HELLAS S.A. (coordinator) and the research institutes: EPPO-ITSAK, NOAIG.

Satellite imagery from the Syria conflict, UNOSAT Rapid Mapping Vanuatu, UNITAR-UNOSAT’s Geotag-X…

New UNITAR-UNOSAT Report – Four Years of Human Suffering – the Syria Conflict as Observed through Satellite Imagery

18 March 2015, Geneva, Switzerland – UNITAR’s Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) has produced a report illustrating the immense human suffering endured by the Syrian people over the last four years as observed through satellite imagery. The Foreword of the report has kindly been written by Ms Valerie Amos, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, UN OCHA. The report illustrates the hardship faced by the civilian population, including

· Impact on local economies through shut-down of markets;
· Destruction of power supplies;
· Destruction of schools and hospitals;
· Indiscriminate attacks on civilian population;
· Internally displaced and refugee populations;
· Cultural heritage and
· Humanitarian access.

Full article

UNOSAT Rapid Mapping Confirms Heavy Damage in Vanuatu

16 March 2015, Geneva, Switzerland – Amid discussions of disaster prevention going on at the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, UNOSAT was scrambled by OCHA on 15 March in the immediate aftermath of colossal cyclone Pam, which hit the Vanuatu islands in the early hours of 14 March 2015. Within the same day of activation, UNOSAT requested the triggering of the International Charter Space and Major Disasters thanks to which the first imagery was received within hours during the same day.

Full article

UNITAR-UNOSAT’s Geotag-X needs your help!

UNITAR-UNOSAT’s Geotag-X (geotagx.org) is a pilot project of the three year Citizen Cyberlab research project. Geotag-X is a platform for crowdsourcing analysis of the media coming out of a disaster situation. As smartphones with cameras and geo-location capabilities become more accessible, more and more media is being created and loaded onto the internet in a disaster situation. With Geotag-X, we want to find a way of harvesting this media, categorising it, and extracting data that is relevant to the response and relief efforts. We want to go beyond binary questions about what is in a photo, and see if we can teach the crowd to perform detailed analyses of media that would normally require specialist skills and expertise. With this research we are attempting to answer questions such as “How much media comes out of a disaster situation?” “How can we effectively collect and categorise that media?”, “What information is in the media that could be useful to the relief and response effort?”, “How can we extract that information?”, “Can we teach the crowd to perform complex analyses of media using only online tools?”

Full article

UNOSAT Report on Damage to Cultural Heritage Sites in Syria calls for Scaled up Protection Efforts

23 December 2014, Geneva, Switzerland – UNITAR today highlighted a new and comprehensive report by its UNOSAT programme that has revealed large scale destruction and damage to cultural heritage sites in Syria, including UNESCO World Heritage Properties. The study, carried out by experts on Syria cultural heritage and UNOSAT satellite image analysts, reviewed 18 different areas inside which a total of 290 locations were found to be directly affected by the ongoing conflict. UNOSAT based its analysis on a combination of commercially available very high resolution satellite images, UNESCO reports, information from archaeological experts on Syria as well as traditional and social media.

Full article

Citizen Cyberscience Wins Recognition for Innovative Social Technology

15 December 2014, Geneva, Switzerland – Crowdcrafting, a Web-based platform for citizen science used also to advance UNOSAT crowdsourcing research, has been selected for the 2014 Nominet Trust 100, a global initiative celebrating the ventures that are using digital technology to change the world for the better. The list is curated by a steering group comprising prominent digital and social entrepreneurs. Each year, the list brings together 100 of the world’s most inspiring examples of social innovation Nominet Trust is the UK’s leading social technology funder.

Full article

When satellite companies talk about the imagery they capture, they play up how you can see big, human-made things: planes and trains and parking lots. Sometimes they might mention, too, how important sky pictures are to foresters or farmers.

But as I’ve seen more and more projects that involve imagery, I’ve been struck by the non-human things you can see. Specifically, the animals.

At least two projects have glimpsed individual creatures at “commercially available” resolutions, about the same level as you can see on Google Maps.

Source

Peru’s first Earth observation satellite will share a ride to low Earth orbit with four small Skybox Imaging satellites planned to launch next year on a European Vega rocket.

Built by Airbus Defense and Space for the government of Peru, the 450-kg (990-lb.) Perusat-1 is a high-resolution optical remote-sensing satellite designed to operate in a Sun-synchronous orbit.

Managed by European launch consortium Arianespace, the launch of PeruSat-1 and its four Skybox co-passengers is set for 2016 from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana.

Arianespace Chairman and CEO Stephane Israel says the agreement is the third that the launch services company has signed for Vega this year. It follows the Skybox agreement announced at the Satellite 2015 show in Washington last week, a deal that marks Vega’s first U.S. customer.

“With this third launch contract since the start of the year, Vega consolidates its leadership in the export market, for both governmental and commercial missions,” he said. “We are extremely proud and honored to be able to serve the Peruvian government through this upcoming launch.”

With PeruSat-1, the Peruvian defense ministry becomes the launch customer for the Airbus AstroBus-S spacecraft bus, which the company says uses technologies that combine performance with shortened production cycles by incorporating know-how gleaned from work on other high-resolution remote-sensing spacecraft.

“The reliability of this platform is the result of the expertise acquired through the development of more complex variants,” the company said in a March 26 statement. These include the French Pleiades and SPOT 6 and 7 remote-sensing missions, Spain’s Ingenio Earth observation satellite, Kazakhstan’s KazEOSat-1 and the Sentinel-2 environmental monitoring mission developed under the European Union’s Copernicus program.

PeruSat-1 is also the first program developed by the “Projects Factory,” a new and more integrated organization in the space systems unit at Airbus Defense and Space.

“This new way of working brings down development and construction lead times for satellites up to 500 kg and optimizes their costs, without impacting quality in any way,” the company says.

Airbus says PeruSat-1 will be delivered within two years of contract signature, which was completed in April 2014.

“When we finish the satellite it will be a record delivery time for such a powerful satellite observation system,” said François Auque, head of space systems at Airbus. “And we are able to deliver to our customer thanks to the use of this new, optimized platform, called AstroBus-S, and applying our ‘Projects Factory’ organization. By integrating all our know-how related to platform, instrument, and ground segment in this way, we are creating a game changer with which we aim to win new markets following PeruSat-1.”

PeruSat-1 will also benefit from the experience gained with the Naomi family of optical instruments developed at Airbus Defense and Space. The technology uses silicon carbide (SiC) optics and structures, multiple-line detectors, integrated focal planes and ultra-compact optical configurations, the company says.

Source

Landsat 8 data is available for anyone to use via Amazon S3.

The Landsat program is a joint effort of the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. First launched in 1972, the Landsat series of satellites has produced the longest, continuous record of Earth’s land surface as seen from space. NASA is in charge of developing remote-sensing instruments and spacecraft, launching the satellites, and validating their performance. USGS develops the associated ground systems, then takes ownership and operates the satellites, as well as managing data reception, archiving, and distribution. Since late 2008, Landsat data have been made available to all users free of charge. Carefully calibrated Landsat imagery provides the U.S. and the world with a long-term, consistent inventory of vitally important global resources.

AWS has made Landsat 8 data freely available on Amazon S3 so that anyone can use our on-demand computing resources to perform analysis and create new products without needing to worry about the cost of storing Landsat data or the time required to download it.

Learn more about how Landsat data is used on NASA’s Landsat Science site

Accessing Landsat Data on AWS

All Landsat 8 scenes from 2015 are available on AWS along with a selection of cloud-free scenes from 2013 and 2014. New Landsat 8 scenes are made available on AWS within hours of production.

Landsat on AWS makes each band of each Landsat scene available as a stand-alone GeoTIFF and the scene’s metadata is hosted as a text file.

The data are organized using a directory structure based on each scene’s path and row. For instance, the files for Landsat scene LC81390452014295LGN00 are available in the following location: s3://landsat-pds/L8/139/045/LC81390452014295LGN00/

More info at

(25 March 2015) PhotoSat has announced that the elevation data processed from DigitalGlobe’s new 30 centimeter resolution satellite, WorldView-3, has been verified as accurate to within 15 centimeters.

DigitalGlobe is a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution earth imagery products and services, and is the first company to offer 30 cm resolution satellite imagery commercially.

For the study, PhotoSat produced a 50 cm grid of elevations using its proprietary geophysical processing technology with stereo satellite images taken by WorldView-3. The resulting elevations were then compared to a 50 cm LiDAR elevation grid in Southeast California, accurate to approximately 5 cm in elevation and available on the OpenTopography website. The size of the comparison area was 88 square kilometers. The resulting 15 cm RMSE elevation accuracy was impressively achieved using a single ground reference point.

PhotoSat’s highly accurate elevation grids have been used for years by oil and gas and mining engineers as a cost-effective alternative to ground surveying and airborne LiDAR mapping. The satellite imagery from WorldView-3 will allow PhotoSat to deliver the highest quality topographic data yet.

“The DigitalGlobe WorldView-3 satellite data is the highest quality satellite photo data that PhotoSat has ever processed,” said Gerry Mitchell, President of PhotoSat. “In this test, an elevation grid extracted from stereo WorldView-3 satellite photos matches a highly accurate LiDAR elevation grid to better than 15 cm in elevation. This result takes satellite elevation mapping into the engineering design and construction markets and directly competes with LiDAR and high resolution air photo mapping for applications like flood plain monitoring.”

“The fact that PhotoSat has validated our elevation data to within 15 cm is amazing and even exceeds our initial expectations,” said Kenyon Waugh, DigitalGlobe’s senior director of vertical segment products. “With these elevation products, customers in the oil, gas, and mining sectors can leverage our truly global reach and realize cost savings on the order of 50 percent.”

About PhotoSat

PhotoSat has invented a new technology that generates the world’s most accurate satellite topographic mapping. This engineering quality data shortens timelines and eliminates surveying delays in all phases of resource and engineering projects. We have delivered over 500 highly accurate elevation mapping projects, and have published a number of accuracy studies which are available on our website.

About DigitalGlobe

DigitalGlobe is a leading provider of commercial high-resolution earth observation and advanced geospatial solutions that help decision makers better understand our changing planet in order to save lives, resources and time. Sourced from the world’s leading constellation, our imagery solutions deliver unmatched coverage and capacity to meet our customers’ most demanding mission requirements.

(source: PhotoSat Information and spacenews