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The OBSERVE project has officially ended, with a final event held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in October 2012. The program has fulfilled all of its obligations and delivered more results and deliverables than those agreed to initially by the European Committee and the project’s coordinator. (By Petros Patias, posted on February 13th, 2013)

The most important aims of OBSERVE was the establishment of a permanent network of stakeholders that will continue working for the benefit of the environment in the Balkan area, and the adoption of good practices that have been applied for many years in the rest of Europe. Additionally, recent advances in Earth observation boost the use of novel satellite and in-situ sensors for the sake of the protection of the environment and the sustainable development.

To this extent, the OBSERVE coordinator (The Aristotle University) and other significant partners and coordinators from other cooperating European projects jointed forces and submitted two new proposals that have been initially qualified, currently are under negotiation and will start in June 2013.

The first of the qualified projects is called “IASON – Fostering sustainability and uptake of research results through networking activities in Black Sea and Mediterranean areas.”

Continuing the OBSERVE legacy, it aims at establishing a permanent and sustainable network of scientific and non-scientific institutions, stakeholders and private sector enterprises, located in the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. The main focal points of the project will be the use and application of Earth observation (EO) in the following topics:

  • Climate changes
  • Resource efficiency
  • Raw material management.

IASON aims at capitalizing on the experiences gained by five projects funded under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7): OBSERVE, enviroGRIDS, GEONETCab, EGIDA, and BalkanGEONet. All of these projects focused on enhancing EO capacities, knowledge and technology in the broader European Union (EU) region. Furthermore, they managed to establish links with a critical mass of research institutions, organizations, public organizations, stakeholders, and policymakers in the Balkan region, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea Basin. In addition, the coordinators of these projects are members of the consortium.

In order to achieve its goal, IASON will engage in:

  • Visible and effective capacity-building and knowledge-transfer activities with regional research institutes and organizations, stakeholders and policymakers
  • Demonstration of economic development through uptake of results, best-case scenarios and success stories
  • Quantifiable engagement of research institutes, projects and networks
  • Identification of projects in the thematic fields that have potential for future cooperation
  • Creation of an innovative web-based common information platform with clustering projects that demonstrate synergy potential.

The second project is called “EOPOWER – Earth Observation for Economic Empowerment.”

Its purpose is to create conditions for sustainable economic development through the increased use of EO products and services for environmental applications. This purpose serves the higher goal of effective use of Earth observation (satellite and in-situ systems) for decision-making and management of economic and sustainable development processes.

The EOPOWER project builds on the results of the GEONetCab, BalkanGEONet, OBSERVE, enviroGRIDS, SEOCA, and EGIDA projects. The GEONetCab project produced global and regional marketing studies, success stories, marketing toolkits and valuable feedback from promotion activities and quick-win projects. This enables the EOPOWER project and the partners involved to benefit fully from the experience of the GEONetCab and the other projects.

The promotion activities of the various projects have been successful, but there are still gaps to be addressed. On the demand side, there are new target groups of potential end-users that are not familiar yet with the possibilities of Earth observation and that have not yet been reached. Involvement of these potential end-users is of cardinal importance for a successful application of Earth observation solutions across the globe. On the supply side, access to data is a necessary condition. The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) will provide this access to data, through the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI). The EOPOWER project will provide an extra push to stimulate the demand side.

This will be achieved through:

  • Roadshow activities to promote the increased use of EO products and services for environmental applications, including capacity-building
  • A portfolio of potential EO applications for economic development and environmental management
  • The enhancement of the resource facility on capacity-building in the GEO web portal
  • The establishment of local focal points (nodes) that actively promote and provide capacity-building on the use of EO for effective and low-cost environmental applications
  • The establishment of a high-level forum of stakeholders (resource providers, international organizations) that have an interest in EO for economic development and environmental applications
  • The establishment of a central feedback node that digests and shares information on incubators, innovation, successes, experiences, visibility, and provides brokerage and advice on resource mobilization.

Petros Patias, OBSERVE coordinator, is a professor and ex-chairman at the School of Rural and Surveying Engineering, The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, board member of the Department of Urban Planning, and Vice Rector at the University of Western Macedonia, Greece. His published work includes six books, four chapters in international books and 161 papers in journals and proceedings.
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Subsystem enhancements will provide greater efficiency and cost savings

AURORA, Colo., April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Raytheon Company RTN -0.50% was awarded an $8 million contract with NASA Goddard Space Center to upgrade the command, control and telemetry (CCT) subsystems of the Earth Observing System (EOS). Enhancing the CCT subsystem will allow NASA to lower maintenance costs by exploiting automation and virtualization technologies, reducing the number of machines that need to be maintained by 69 percent.

“This contract enables Raytheon to continue our rich history of providing program excellence and reliable engineering solutions to NASA’s earth observation missions,” says James Olson, director of Space and Environmental Missions for Raytheon’s Intelligence, Information and Services business. “Today’s budget environment requires innovative solutions to reduce costs. Greater automation will streamline EOS operational costs, and virtualization technologies will cut maintenance costs by minimizing the CCT computing footprint.”

The EOS CCT subsystem evolution and development contract, which supports the Terra, Aqua, Aura and TRMM missions, will continue to give scientists and climate researchers access to valuable data to better understand how the earth’s atmosphere, oceans and lands interact.

Raytheon developed the core components of NASA’s EOS CCT subsystem by integrating its command and control ECLIPSE®-based online software, which became operational in 1999. In addition to automation and enhanced virtualization, Raytheon will continue upgrading the system’s cybersecurity posture by incorporating the evolving National Institute of Standards and Technology-based security controls and updating the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software.

About RaytheonRaytheon Company, with 2012 sales of $24 billion and 68,000 employees worldwide, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, security and civil markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 91 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 a broad range of mission support services. Raytheon is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. For more about Raytheon, visit us at www.raytheon.com and follow us on Twitter @raytheon.

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[Satellite TODAY 04-08-13] Matt Perkins, CEO of Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL), has been elected Vice-Chair of the U.K. Industry Association for Space (UKspace), the trade association of the UK space industry.

He will take the place of Stuart Martin, who has been appointed CEO of the newly formed Satellite Applications Catapult in January.

UKspace aims to grow the UK space industry, promote awareness in government, media and the public, and act as a forum for discussion about industry challenges. It played an important role in the expansion of the Harwell Space Cluster, the establishment of a Satellite Applications Catapult Centre, and the increasing the UK’s commitment to European Space Agency (ESA) activities.

“This is a pivotal time for the UK space industry, with Government recognizing and supporting our high tech manufacturing and service industries to achieve economic growth and skills development. I believe the UK now has a strong foundation to make a big impact in the global space market and I am delighted that I have been appointed to lead this change during the next two years,” Matt Perkins said in a statement.

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(21. März 2013) The U.S. Air Force’s second Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO-2) spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, was successfully launched today at 5:21 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

The SBIRS program delivers timely, reliable and accurate missile warning and infrared surveillance information to the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, combatant commanders, the intelligence community and other key decision makers. The system enhances global missile launch detection capability, supports the nation’s ballistic missile defense system, expands the country’s technical intelligence gathering capacity and bolsters situational awareness for warfighters on the battlefield. The SBIRS architecture includes a resilient mix of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, hosted payloads in highly elliptical earth (HEO) orbit, and ground hardware and software. The first two GEO satellites and HEO payloads have now launched. SBIRS GEO-2 includes highly sophisticated scanning and staring sensors that will deliver improved infrared sensitivity and a reduction in area revisit times over the current constellation.

Credits: Space War / SPX

Looking down from orbit is an attractive way of monitoring historical sites in remote or politically unstable regions – and can even help archaeologists to make new discoveries.

The ancient city of Samarra was a powerful Islamic capital during the ninth century, located in what is today Iraq. It is the only surviving Islamic capital that retains its original plan, architecture and arts, although only about 20% of the site has been excavated.

In 2007, during the height of the Iraq War, it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Danger because of the responsible authorities’ inability to control and manage its conservation.

That same year, insurgents launched a second attack on the city’s mosque and damaged the clock tower.

Monitoring sites like Samarra during periods of political instability is both difficult and dangerous for archaeologists. Satellites, however, offer a non-invasive solution to monitor these remnants of the past, and can even help to identify new areas to excavate.

The most obvious way to keep tabs on excavated sites from space is with high-resolution optical images. But new techniques reveal that satellites carrying radars can also see how underground structures influence the soil.

Radar is sensitive to properties like slight differences in soil density and water content – things the human eye cannot see. Changes in soil moisture and in vegetation growth can also be detected by radar. These factors are influenced by underground structures and can be used to infer historical features.

Radar can also see through clouds and darkness, providing consistent observations day or night and under all atmospheric conditions.

Radar imagery is complex, so not all radar detections can be easily explained. But some of these detections may identify unexcavated sites.

Along the Nile River in Sudan’s Northern state, tombs, temples and living complexes make up the Gebel Barkal archaeological sites. Registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List, they are testimony to the Napatan and Meroitic cultures of about 900 BC to 350 AD.

Using the ‘polarimetric synthetic aperture radar’ technique, scientists from Italy’s La Sapienza and France’s Rennes 1 universities were able to look at the pyramids and temples of Gebel Barkal. Their observations not only allowed them to monitor the site remotely during a time of political instability, but revealed that there may be more beneath that soil that has not yet been excavated.

Satellite observations can also be useful for monitoring and identifying buried archaeological structures in densely populated areas. In Rome, Italy, major ancient sites like the Colosseum and Roman Forum are part of the cityscape. But there are also hidden treasures beneath the hustle and bustle of the modern metropolis.

A student from Italy’s Tor Vergata University has found that optical satellite imagery can reveal buried archaeological features in the eastern outskirts of Rome due to differences in the spectral reflection (particularly in the near-infrared) of the overlying vegetation.

Future missions such as Japan’s ALOS-2 satellite, scheduled for launch this year, will build on previous missions with their unique capabilities to further archaeology from space. ESA’s Biomass candidate mission would also contribute with its novel radar.

Source ESA and Spacedaily

Efforts to monitor the world’s forests and other ecosystems got a big boost in February with the launch of Landsat 8, NASA’s newest earth observation satellite, which augments the crippled Landsat 7 currently orbiting Earth (technically Landsat 8 is still named the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) and will remain so until May when the USGS turns control of the satellite over to NASA).

Last week Landsat 8/LDCM sent back its first image, showing the meeting of the Great Plains with the Front Ranges of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming and Colorado. The image showcases the satellite’s nine spectral bands, which include three visible light bands, two near-infrared bands, and two shortwave infrared (SWIR) bands, among others, as well as two thermal sensors.

Landsat 8/LDCM is the most advanced Earth observation satellite to date. It is the eighth Landsat since the initial launch in 1972.

Landsat 8/LDCM will circle the Earth every 99 minutes and cover the entire globe every 16 days, beaming 400 high resolution images to ground stations every 24 hours. The images, which are freely distributed, are used for a wide range of applications, including efforts to monitor environmental change, detect fires, and watch crops. Google is one of the biggest commercial users of Landsat images, which feed into Google Earth, but other users include scientists and conservationists involved in tracking deforestation and forest degradation. Accordingly, the new satellite was welcomed by members of the conservation community.

“Landsat 8 is a much anticipated and critically needed satellite for Earth resource mapping, monitoring and analysis,” Greg Asner, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology, told mongabay.com. “Nearly every country serious about deforestation monitoring uses the Landsat series, which are made available for free by the U.S. government.

Asner, who leads a team that developed advanced deforestation monitoring platforms known as Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLAS) and CLASlite, says the new system marks a sharp improvement over the recently-failed Landsat 5 and Landsat 7, which suffers from partial data loss due a 2003 sensor failure.

“Of course, our Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLAS) and CLASlite – the mostly widely disseminated forest change mapping software in the world — will fully support Landsat 8, just as it has for the previous Landsat instruments,” he said. “I am really looking forward to helping the community continue to use Landsat data for conservation and management of tropical forests.”

Christopher Potter, a researcher at NASA-Ames Research Center, added that Landsat 8 will provide critical continuity in forest monitoring efforts.

“Images from Landsat 8 will provide the ongoing capability to monitor land cover change around the world by extending the 30+ year historical record of Landsat 5 and 7,” Potter told mongabay.com. “Continuity of high-quality data make Landsat unique for tracking forest conservation efforts.”

Conservationists say they intend to use imagery captured by Landsat to monitor forest cover in near-real time, potentially enabling authorities to take action against illegal deforesters. In the past, Landsat images have provided an important baseline for tracking land use change over time, including the expansion of oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, conversion of rainforests for industrial timber production in Sumatra, selective logging of rainforests in Peru, and deforestation for soy farms and cattle ranches in the Brazilian Amazon.

Landsat data can also help forest conservation projects under the proposed Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) quantify reductions in carbon emissions, potentially generating cash for forest-dependent communities and project developers.

“Without question, Landsat 8 is the most important new satellite of this century for monitoring land cover change,” said Asner. “No other satellites, other than previous Landsat systems, have proven to be as accurate for tropical deforestation and forest degradation monitoring as Landsat 8 will prove to be in the coming years.”

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(02 Apr 2013)Posted by Quirin Schiermeier. A €400-million (US$513 million) radar project that is designed to measure global forest biomass in unprecedented detail will very probably launch around the end of the decade as the next Earth-observation mission by the European Space Agency (ESA).

ESA’s Earth Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) says that it found BIOMASS the technically and scientifically most convincing of three candidate missions discussed last month at a user meeting in Graz, Austria (see Nature 495, 15; 2013). The two other missions — COReH2O and PREMIER — would have measured global snow cover and atmospheric composition, respectively.

The committee’s recommendation must still be ratified by ESA’s Earth Observation Programme Board, which comprises representatives of the agency’s 20 member states. The board, which meets 5–6 May in Svalbard, Norway, has never overturned an ESAC recommendation.

Estimated construction costs for BIOMASS amount to around €400 million. A spacecraft, scheduled for launch around 2020, will fly a 70-centimetre wavelength radar sensor capable of probing trees’ heights and structures, such as trunks and canopies, in minute detail. Multiple repeat orbits are to produce three-dimensional maps of most of the world’s forests.

Radar measurements of forest biomass are one indicator of changes in biodiversity and are particularly valuable across the tropical forest belt, where ground inventory data are scarce or do not exist. Accurate space observations of biomass will also help quantify carbon emissions resulting from deforestation and land-use changes.

But the BIOMASS mission might come with a caveat. The frequency band of its radar interferes with military applications such as the US space-object tracking radar. If planned discussions between ESA and the US department of defence over frequency allocation come to nothing, it might mean that the mission radar cannot operate over large swaths of North America and, possibly, Europe.

“We would certainly like to look at deforestation and forest re-growth in the United States and Europe,” says Shaun Quegan, a carbon-cycle researcher at the University of Sheffield, UK, who chairs the BIOMASS project. “But our main interest lies in the tropics — and it is there where the mission will make a real difference.”

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Source Sensors & Systems

The sciences, technologies, and practices of remote sensing and of geographic information systems (GIS) arose separately, developed in parallel, intersected, and are now inextricably linked. Nearly all the features in most GIS are collected by means of satellite imagery or aerial photogrammetry, and GIS is the application where this imagery is most commonly visualized. “All the foundation elements of GIS come from remote sensing: cultural features, roads, buildings, water features, topography, terrain, soils, slopes, geology, and many more,” points out Lawrie Jordan, Director of Imagery at Esri.

Merging Two Approaches

It was not always this way. In the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, remote sensing and image processing, on the one hand, and GIS on the other, were separate worlds—each with its own culture and software. The former stored data in a raster format and used multispectral classification; the latter stored data in a vector format and used topology. Software vendors specialized in one or the other—even though their customers were acquiring and using both types of data. Until recently, in a GIS context, imagery was thought of only as a background or a base map to the information that was being analyzed.

Over the last decade, however, remote sensing and GIS have become increasingly integrated. “Now people are seeing imagery as a source of a lot of GIS information,” says Jennifer Stefanacci, Director of Product Management at Exelis. “So, the analysis workflows that our users are doing incorporate both analysis of the imagery and analysis of their GIS data.” While GIS gives you the information about ‘where,’ through information extraction routines, remote sensing gives you the information about ‘what,’ explains Mladen Stojic, V.P. of Geospatial at Intergraph, “By merging the two, we now have the opportunity to do modeling with raster data, vector data, and, on top of that, terrain data.”

Today, GIS is the most practical and efficient platform to combine remote sensing with other layers of information. “People do not acquire and process imagery just to make a pretty picture out of it,” says Jordan. “They want to combine it with other spatial information to solve problems and create meaningful results.”

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(Beijing, Mar 29) China’s first satellite for its high—resolution system for Earth observation, aimed at reducing disasters and protecting resources, will be launched in April.

Examinations of the satellite and its carrier rocket — the Long March 2D — have been completed and the satellite is now in the launch stage, State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SATIND) said.

China plans to launch five to six satellites before the end of 2015 in order to build a spatial, temporal and spectral high—resolution observation system.

The system is expected to help reduce disasters, protect resources, the environment and national security, as well as support geographic and oceanic surveys and urban transportation management, the SATIND said.

It will also enhance China’s ability to obtain high—resolution observation data and accelerate its development of satellite application technologies, state run Xinhua news agency reported.

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