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CrescoAg Corporation (CrescoAg) and Raytheon Company (Raytheon) have entered into an exclusive agreement to develop a new generation of agricultural technologies and analytics designed to help agriculture producers increase productivity and manage their operations more efficiently.

The CrescoAg-Raytheon collaboration will pair Raytheon’s demonstrated capabilities in engineering, climatic science, analytics, sensor technology and systems integration with CrescoAg’s agricultural domain knowledge, farming expertise and relationships within the network of crop input retailers and advisors. Utilizing mobile and advanced cloud computing, the CrescoAg-Raytheon collaboration will deliver information products and technologies that will help agronomic advisors support growers in their efforts to increase efficiency, productivity, profitability and crop sustainability.

“Raytheon has made major investments in research and development in analytics, climate science and Big Data computing for our customers in the defense and Intelligence Communities that have applications in farming and the agriculture community,” said Bill Jones, vice president for Systems Modernization and Sustainment at Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services. “For example, historical trends combined with real-time local weather will be available on smart devices, allowing farmers to make cropping, planting and harvesting decisions and, at the same time, inform decisions on which investments to make in other equipment such as irrigation and drainage technologies.”

“We are thrilled to partner with Raytheon scientists and engineers to develop what we believe will be the most advanced precision agriculture and analytical tools that the industry has seen,” said Barry Knight, president of CrescoAg. “U.S. farmers are already adopting precision ag technologies at a record pace. This collaboration will provide them and their trusted advisors with new ways to combine farmers’ crop production activities with innovative climatic, remote sensing and analytical technologies.”

Headquartered in Memphis, CrescoAg provides geospatial data management, data analysis, and precision agriculture services to agricultural retailers, crop advisors and companies across the United States. The company is committed to further expanding its analytical footprint into both domestic and international regions of agricultural importance.

Knight notes that CrescoAg is already collaborating with Raytheon on product concepts that will be tested during the 2014 growing season, with a goal of offering step-change improvements in how producers and their trusted agronomic advisors examine the contribution of seed, tillage practices and other agricultural inputs to their operations.

About CrescoAg: CrescoAg, Inc. is an agricultural information management company based in Memphis, Tennessee. The company’s suite of products and services enables retailers and crop consultants to improve efficiency in their operations, offer new services, and deliver decision-making tools to customers. CrescoAg is focused upon commercializing technologies and applications that make precision agriculture data easier to collect, manage, interpret and translate into profitable decision-making. For more information, visit www.crescoag.com.

About Raytheon: Raytheon Company, with 2013 sales of $24 billion and 63,000 employees worldwide, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, security and civil markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 92 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration and other capabilities in the areas of sensing; effects; and command, control, communications and intelligence systems, as well as cyber security and a broad range of mission support services. Raytheon is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. For more about Raytheon, visit us at www.raytheon.com.

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Every time we get in a car and drive, we burn gasoline, releasing carbon dioxide and other compounds into the air and disturbing Earth’s climate. Our use of fossil fuels continues to increase exponentially, with more than half of all fossil fuels ever used by humans being consumed in the last 20 years.

In comparison with the amount of carbon that enters the atmosphere from natural sources, our fossil fuel emissions are modest. “Carbon dioxide generated by human activities amounts to only a few percent of the total yearly atmospheric uptake or loss of carbon dioxide from plant life and geochemical processes on land and in the ocean,” said Gregg Marland, a professor in the Geology Department of Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina.

“This may not seem like much, but humans have essentially tipped the balance.”

Scientists are able to accurately measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, both today and in the past, and the impact of our activities is apparent in those measurements. Before the Industrial Revolution, there were about 280 molecules of carbon dioxide out of every million molecules in the atmosphere, that is, 280 parts per million. By 2014, the concentration had risen to about 400 parts per million.

Although we know the concentration of carbon dioxide, much about the processes that govern the gas’s atmospheric concentration remains a mystery. We still do not know precisely where all of the carbon dioxide comes from and where it is being stored when it leaves the air. That information is crucial for understanding the impact of human activities on climate and for evaluating options for mitigating or adapting to climate change.

Scientists expect to get some answers soon to these and other compelling carbon questions, thanks to the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a new Earth-orbiting NASA satellite scheduled to launch on July 1. OCO-2 will allow scientists to record detailed daily measurements of carbon dioxide — around 100,000 measurements of the gas around the world every day.

“Now that humans are acknowledging the environmental effects of our dependence on fossil fuels and other carbon dioxide-emitting activities, our goal is to analyze the sources and sinks of this carbon dioxide and to find better ways to manage it,” Marland said.

“If you visualize a column of air that stretches from Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 will identify how much of that vertical column is carbon dioxide, with an understanding that most is emitted at the surface,” said Marland.

“Simply, it will act like a plane observing the smoke from forest fires down below, with the task of assessing where the fires are and how big they are. Compare that aerial capability with sending a lot of people into the forest looking for fires. The observatory will use its vantage point from space to capture a picture of where the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide are, rather than our cobbling data together from multiple sources with less frequency, reliability and detail.”

Kevin Gurney, an associate professor at Arizona State University, Tempe, believes OCO-2 will complement a suite of NASA-funded efforts he is currently leading that quantify fossil fuel emissions by using statistics on fuel, activity of cars, etc., to pinpoint emissions on scales as small as an individual city building or street.

“This research and OCO-2 together will act like partners in closing the carbon budget, with my data products estimating movements from the bottom up and OCO-2 estimating sources from the top down,” Gurney said.

“By tackling the problem from both perspectives, we’ll stand to achieve an independent, mutually compatible view of the carbon cycle. And the insight gained by combining these top-down and bottom-up approaches might take on special significance in the near future as our policymakers consider options for regulating carbon dioxide across the entire globe.”

For more about OCO-2 please go here

(June 2014) Japan’s space agency released the first photographs taken by the Daichi-2 advanced land observation satellite on July 27, which showed detailed images of the aftermath of last October’s deadly mudslides on Izu-Oshima island.


“The images turned out to be finer than we had expected,” said Masanobu Shimada, science program leader at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Earth Observation Research Center. “We have great expectations for the new satellite in helping us grasp of the scope of damage in natural disasters and monitor the Earth for changes in the environment.”

The images were taken June 19-21 at an altitude of 628 kilometers.

The images of Izu-Oshima island, about 100 kilometers south of Tokyo, revealed streaks on the surface of Mount Mihara that were left behind after the Oct. 16 typhoon dumped heavy rains on the island, creating mudslides that killed more than 30 people.

The satellite also took photos of 3,776-meter-high Mount Fuji, capturing detailed images of the geographic contours of Japan’s tallest peak.

Launched into orbit in May, the Daichi-2 satellite is capable of distinguishing ground objects as small as 1 to 3 meters in length and has a resolution five to 15 times higher than its predecessor, the Daichi. The Daichi-2’s ability to shoot images of the Earth’s surface at night and when it is cloudy is also greatly improved from the Daichi.

Images of the shrinking Amazon rain forests in South America were also taken by the Daichi-2.

Images captured by the satellite can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKi6wOnezig
bq. JAXA’s press release is shown at http://global.jaxa.jp/press/2014/06/20140627_daichi2.html

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 19, 2014—Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) announced today that it is adding another new agronomic service to its Connected Farm™ solution. The PurePixel™ Precision Vegetation Health Solution provides specialized processing of multi-spectral images used for crop health analysis. Field images processed with PurePixel technology provide farmers and their trusted advisors with a visual representation of the selected field?s crop health or maturity level based on a color-coded index. Since PurePixel filters out non-crop artifacts such as soil, shadows, and surface wetness, it can be used on fields with newly emerged vegetation or fields with full crop canopy.

PurePixel produces a vegetation vigor index map, which is a calibrated representation of vegetation health that can be used to track crop growth and measure the magnitude of difference between areas. Because PurePixel maps use a calibrated index, users can compare multiple images of the same area and visually detect changes in crop health over time. This feature is especially useful for monitoring expected progress in crop growth or improvements in crop health when treating underperforming areas within fields.

“With PurePixel’s more accurate and comprehensive vegetation health data, Trimble is providing farmers and their trusted advisors with another tool they can use to make better decisions,” said Levi Kettle, Connected Farm business area director of Trimble’s Agriculture Division. “The challenge with spatial data such as imagery is interpreting the results that lead to accurate and efficient decisions. By removing the ‘noise’ and delivering precisely geo-referenced field-ready maps, PurePixel enables trusted advisors to be more efficient in locating, identifying and solving crop production problems.”

“PurePixel imagery has been a critical part of my farm management and consulting for years,” said Steve Harrow, certified crop advisor for Trinity Ag Services. “With the solution I can cover thousands of acres and then go immediately to problem areas long before I would have detected them from walking fields. The imagery gives me an early warning system, so I can navigate to problem areas in my fields, diagnose the problem, and then write a prescription—all before we suffer economic losses.”

PurePixel allows users to:

  • Save time by quickly viewing large areas and identifying specific locations where issues may be present, enabling the farmer or trusted advisor to travel only to the targeted areas versus scouting the entire field
  • Make timely early-season decisions on newly emerged crop with PurePixel’s ability to significantly reduce image noise enabling critical decisions to be made prior to full crop canopy
  • Identify differences in crop health and maturity even when crop health is generally strong
  • Assess changes in canopy size and quality by analyzing multiple PurePixel maps from the same field within a season or over several seasons

PurePixel is an additional product Trimble has added to its newly launched agronomic suite of services. These services also include the Soil Information System™ (SIS) solution, a revolutionary soil analysis mapping technology. When PurePixel is used in conjunction with SIS, the savings can be significant. For example, a 200-acre vineyard saved 40 percent on inputs by leveraging both services leading to an annual savings of $300,000. In addition, the vineyard also was able to maximize its water use.

PurePixel images are accessed through the Connected Farm, which provides one central location for accessing key information impacting farm operations such as rainfall totals, weather forecasts, commodity tracking, planting coverage, yield mapping, fleet management, aerial imaging, and irrigation monitoring and control. With this information a farmer can make better decisions about his operation. For example, knowing daily rainfall totals can determine whether irrigation is needed, while wind speed data may be the deciding factor on whether to spray a given field or delay the activity. Comparing data from the Connected Farm Scout app or from aerial images against yield, soil, and field maps can aid in deciding the best seed variety and amount to plant in each portion of the field. To maximize fleet performance, Connected Farm’s fleet productivity reports can reveal a problem area where efficiency can be increased.

The PurePixel solution is currently available, and can be purchased using the Connected Farm Web site at: https://field.connectedfarm.com. For more information on PurePixel, visit: www.trimble.com/agriculture/purepixel.

About Trimble’s Agriculture Division

Trimble Agriculture solutions enable customers to maximize efficiency and reduce chemical and fertilizer inputs while also protecting natural resources and the environment. Trimble’s precision agriculture solutions cover all seasons, crops, terrains, and farm sizes, and its brand-agnostic strategy allows farmers to use Trimble products on most vehicles in their fleet—regardless of manufacturer. To enable better decision making, Trimble offers the Connected Farm solution which allows farmers to collect, share, and manage information across their farm in real time. To optimize water use, Trimble provides water solutions for irrigation, drainage, and land leveling. Trimble’s product suite includes vehicle and implement guidance and steering, as well as a portfolio of correction options that are the most versatile of their kind in the industry. Additional solutions include an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for aerial imaging and mapping; application control for seed, liquid, and granular products; a harvest solution; and farm management software.

For more information on Trimble Agriculture, visit: www.trimble.com/agriculture.

About Trimble

Trimble applies technology to make field and mobile workers in businesses and government significantly more productive. Solutions are focused on applications requiring position or location—including surveying, construction, agriculture, fleet and asset management, public safety and mapping. In addition to utilizing positioning technologies, such as GPS, lasers and optics, Trimble solutions may include software content specific to the needs of the user. Wireless technologies are utilized to deliver the solution to the user and to ensure a tight coupling of the field and the back office. Founded in 1978, Trimble is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Media Contact: LeaAnn McNabb of Trimble: 408-481-7808

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Interview co-founder Ching-Yu Hu


Skybox aims to deploy a fleet of satellites that will be able to map any place in the world, five to seven times a day.

When Ching-Yu Hu says she’s the only “nonrocket scientist” among her company’s four co-founders, it’s tempting to think she’s speaking metaphorically. But before starting Skybox, her co-founders were working on the Google X prize for the moon rover. They are literally rocket scientists.

The three—Dan Berkenstock, Julian Mann, and John Fenwick—were also classmates of Hu’s in a 2008 Stanford entrepreneurship class. As part of the class, students had to do the groundwork to form a venture-backed company. Hu says she “literally went up to them and said, ‘Hi; I’m going to be part of your team…’ They were clearly the three smartest people in the room, and I didn’t want to spend my last days at Stanford working on some silly project.”

Hu had studied statistics at University of California, Berkeley, and was getting her master’s in engineering at Stanford. Before meeting her co-founders, she thought she’d go work on Wall Street. Now, she’s handled functions including finance and marketing for a company whose mission is to provide timely high-resolution images of any location in the world using its own fleet of custom-designed satellites.

“We’re on a path to launch 24 satellites that will let us see any spot on Earth five times a day,” she says. If all goes well, that will happen in about five years. The company is also building a data platform to let it analyze the information coming back from those pictures and integrate it with data from other sources, public and private. If you think that sounds like the kind of data set Google would lust after, you’re absolutely right: Skybox agreed to be acquired by the search giant in June for $500 million.

Given the amount of activity in Skybox’s industry, the data platform could well turn out to be Skybox’s not-so-secret sauce. Urthecast, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based startup, recently released images taken by its cameras, which are bolted to the outside of the International Space Station. Planet Labs is tossing up dozens of supercheap, supersmall satellites, but their resolution will be 3 to 5 meters per pixel, compared with Skybox’s 90 centimeters per pixel.

Hu’s team started fundraising for Skybox in January 2009. Its pitch detailed its vision for businesses if timely, high-resolution imagery were easier to come by (currently, the U.S. government buys up most of the time available on suitable satellites). Port monitoring, for example, could be transformed. Predictions of crop yields could become much more accurate. Insurance companies and aid organizations could get vastly better, faster information about the effects of natural disasters.

The team nabbed $3 million from Khosla Ventures and has since raised $91 million. Skybox has grown to 130 employees. Its customers can order individual images just before a satellite flies over an area of interest, or they can subscribe to a stream of images, data, analytics, or some combination of the three. Hu says the company has customers and revenue but won’t divulge details.

The company designs its own satellites and cameras, then partners with others to build and launch them. Most comparable satellites are about the size of a school bus, with large telescopes and redundant systems. Skybox’s are about the size of a mini fridge. “Most of the innovation at Skybox has been about getting a high-performance optic into a small package,” says Hu. “The cost of deploying a satellite is directly related to its size and mass.”

In turn, Skybox hopes it’ll be able to keep costs low enough to appeal both to corporate customers and nongovernmental organizations. Those childhood dreams of having your very own spy satellite are ever closer to coming true.

Source

(25 June 2014) Every time you buy seafood at a restaurant, store, or waterfront dock there is a 1-in-5 chance that the fish was caught outside the law.

Illegal and unreported fishing worldwide accounts for up to 26 million metric tons of fish annually, worth up to $23.5 billion. That equates to more than 1,800 pounds of wild-caught fish stolen from our seas every second.

To help end this major global threat to the viability of our oceans, the UK-based Satellite Applications Catapult is today announcing its partnership with the non-governmental organisation Pew Charitable Trusts and satellite data services company exactEarth Europe to capture and analyse satellite shipping data, and combine it with more vessel information to detect, track and prosecute illegal fishers.

At the core of this effort will be a powerful, nimble programme that will routinely gather information from satellite sources and merge it with data from coastguards and local fishermen around the world to pinpoint the location of suspect vessels. This will enable coastguard officers, port officials, and fisheries managers and law enforcers to access current, accurate intelligence on vessel location and routes, allocated catch, licences, history of fishing activity and more.

Stuart Martin, CEO of the Satellite Applications Catapult, said, “This ground breaking partnership will support the Global Ocean Commission (GOC) Mission Ocean initiative, launched today, to save and restore ocean health. This new partnership will give the people charged with protecting the world’s fisheries a front-row view of what is actually happening on the water. Currently, illegal fishers can always find a place to hide on the vast oceans. Our work will shine a spotlight on those criminals and their activities, and help bring them to justice.”

Tony Long, director of Pew’s Ending Illegal Fishing Project, said, “Combining satellite technology with maritime expertise to combat illegal fishing makes sense economically, environmentally and socially. Criminal fishing operations use a wide range of ruses to steal fish from the commons, victimising everyone who relies on the oceans for food and a livelihood. This project closes the net around illegal fishing.”

The project to fight illegal fishing emerged from one of the Catapult spark workshops, which invite experts from diverse fields to develop innovative, effective solutions to major problems using satellite-derived data.

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(May 2014) OHB AG will be pooling the skills and capacities of its subsidiaries OHB System AG and Erwin Kayser-Threde GmbH with the aim of additionally strengthening OHB as a leading German space technology group in the European market.

OHB System AG (Bremen) and Erwin Kayser-Threde GmbH (Munich) already work jointly on major projects such as the MTG weather satellites and the EnMAP environmental satellite. There is already a structured allocation of tasks reflecting the two companies’ individual strengths.

The possibility of merging the two companies is currently being explored in detail in order to additionally strengthen the joint activities and to address future challenges in operating activities more effectively. These preparations are to be completed by the end of August 2014.

The merger will result in a system company for satellites and payloads in Germany capable of assuming a new role in the European market on account of its scale. OHB customers in particular will benefit from the heightened efficiency and competitiveness. The transaction will be a merger of equals with key management functions and sustained recruitment and personnel development activities based at both sites.

One aspect of the realignment of OHB’s German satellite and payload business entails the combination of Erwin Kayser-Threde GmbH’s two present facilities in Munich in new premises tailored to future requirements. For this reason, a new building is currently being constructed in the direct vicinity of the DLR Space Center in Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich. These new premises will accommodate technical facilities allowing OHB to assume responsibility for new and challenging projects. With a total budget of over EUR 30 million, the construction project has reached the shell phase and is scheduled for completion in mid 2015.

Contact for media representatives:
Martin Stade
Head of Corporate Communications
Phone: +49 421 – 2020-620
Fax: +49 421 – 2020-9898
e-mail: pr@ohb.de
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Researchers have figured out a new way to predict which rivers are most at risk of dangerous flooding.

To do so, they measured how much water was stored in a river basin months ahead of the spring flood season.

“Just like a bucket can only hold so much water, the same concept applies to river basins,” said lead study author J.T. Reager, an earth scientist at the University of California, Irvine. When the ground is saturated, or filled to its brim, conditions are ripe for flooding.

Reager and his colleagues looked back in time using satellite data, and measured how much water was soaking the ground before the 2011 Missouri River floods. The researchers found their statistical model strongly predicted this major flood event five months in advance. With less reliability, the prediction could be extended to 11 months in advance, the researchers said.

Source: Live Science

Indonesia: Satellite images have found that Indonesia’s ancient forests, a cradle of biodiversity and a buffer against climate change, have shrunk much faster than thought, scientists said. Between 2000 and 2012, Indonesia lost around 6.02 million hectares of primary forest, an area almost the size of Sri Lanka, they reported.

Primary or ancient forests are distinguished from managed forests, which are plantations of trees grown for timber and pulp.

The researchers found that primary forest loss accelerated during the period under review, reaching an annual 840,000 hectares by 2012 ― nearly twice the deforestation rate of Brazil, which was 460,000 hectares in the same year.

“Indonesia’s forests contain high floral and faunal biodiversity, including 10 percent of the world’s plants, 12 percent of the world’s mammals, 16 percent of the world’s reptile-amphibians and 17 percent of the world’s bird species,” said the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Extensive clearing of Indonesian primary forest cover directly results in habitat loss and associated plant and animal extinctions.”

The research, led by geographer Belinda Margono of the University of Maryland, looked at long-term satellite images.

During 2000-2012, total forest cover in Indonesia retreated by 15.79 million hectares, of which 6.02 million, or 38 percent, was primary forest, the investigation found.

Source: Korea Herald
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1st July 2014, the new ad interim President of NEREUS is Nichi Vendola, President of Puglia Region (Italy)

NEREUS, Network of European Regions Using Space Technologies, is an initiative by regions with the common objective to spread the use and understanding of space technologies across Europe for the benefits of regions and their citizens. NEREUS not only serves as an advocate for the regions in matters of space uses (regional end-user) but aims at playing an active role in the construction and development of markets for space based services and applications. In this respect the network promotes a cross- sectorial approach and calls for facilitating optimal exploitation of Europe’s space systems for societal challenges and innovation performance in the Union. As a strong voice for the regional dimension of European Space Policy, NEREUS wants to increase and enhance the participation of citizens and companies (especially SMEs) in the European Space Policy and Programmes.

Beginning from the 1st July 2014, Nichi Vendola is the new ad interim President of NEREUS, succeeding to Mr. Alain Beneteau (Midi-Pyrénées, FR) who continues to be involved in the political representation of the network as Vice President together with Mr. Christian Bruns (Bremen, DE) and Mr. Mark Lester (East Midlands, UK). Nichi Vendola is the President of Puglia Region (Italy) since 2005 and member of ENVE and CIVEX committees of the Committee of Regions.

Upcoming activities:
7/10/2014 at 2.30 pm: OPEN DAYS 2014 Workshop
“SPACE4REGIONS”: Satellite solutions as a driver for innovation and growth
Venue : Nereus premises- Rue Montoyer 21, 1000 Bruxelles
Contacts: Phone +32.2.2305775 email nereus.bruxelles@euroinbox.com

Source Nereus