EARSC, the European Association of Remote Sensing companies, is conducting an industry survey to map the state and health of companies providing EO services in Europe. Will you contribute?
Airbus Intelligence has partnered with TerraNIS to export Farmstar, its precision farming and crop monitoring service, outside of France
Albedo launching very-high-resolution optical imagery instruments along with thermal infrared sensors
CollectiveCrunch, a Finnish startup building sustainable forestry platform using satellite data among other sources raised €1.4M
Iceye and Satlantis proposing the Tandem4EO constellation to Spain, made up of optical and radar satellites
Impact Observatory, a US-based startup building global land cover maps from EO data raised $4.9M in seed funding, from investors including Esri
Galaxeye Space launching a satellite with SAR and optical sensors
Maxar partnering with Umbra for access to high-resolution SAR imagery and acquiring Aurora Insights for radio frequency signal monitoring
Meta released its Segment Anything Model that automatically extracts objects from images, with huge potential for processing satellite data
NASA awarded Iceye with a contract to provide high-resolution SAR (1m to 15m) data for evaluation within the Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition program, which includes Planet, Spire & Maxar as suppliers
Planet to enhance their data analysis platform through the acquisition of Sinergise tech. Planet reported record Q4 earnings bringing in $53M and also announced its plans to acquire Sinergise, an EO data platform from Slovenia. Planet is partnering with EO platform startup Ursa Space allowing access to its daily imagery on Ursa’s platform and with environmental software startup Upstream Tech offering subscriptions to its basemap product. Planet is also collaborating with The Nature Conservancy to build Blue Carbon Explorer, a digital tool to map mangrove and seagrass blue carbon around the world. Planet diversifying into hyperspectral with Tanager instruments
SatelliteVu, the UK-based thermal infrared satellite startup received £300K in public funding from the Energy Entrepreneurs Fund for research on using their datasets for commercial solar farm monitoring
Satellogic will be building and launching, what looks like, a hyperspectral sensor to orbit designed in collaboration with agtech firm InnerPlant
Sidus Space, a startup offering EO solutions through a space-as-a-service model is partnering with SatLab to integrate its automated identification system technology into the LizzieSat multi-sensor satellite constellation
Tomorrow.io launching precipitation radars and microwave sounders
UK startup Space Intelligence which builds carbon monitoring solutions from EO data is partnering with Everland, a company that manages the world’s largest portfolio of forest conservation projects
Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, launched AquaWatch Australia, a a 'weather service' for water quality leveraging EO data
China released public images from one of their more recent satellites, with a thermal infrared imaging instrument, and a hyperspectral imager, aimed at monitoring greenhouse gases and environmental applications
Digital Earth Africa, the EO platform for Africa has received additional funding for three more years from its original donors
Dubai’s Electricity and Water Authority will launch an EO satellite, Dewa Sat-2, with a multispectral sensor after the first mission Dewa Sat-1, which had an IoT sensor, for planning, operation, and maintenance activities
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson claimed that the proposed spending reductions for US fiscal year 2024 could lead to cancellations of planned EO missions in the Earth System Observatory program
Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), which provides open access to high resolution satellite imagery of the world’s rainforests has been extended by a year, until September 2024
UAE and China have signed an MoU to advance meteorological technologies including satellite-based monitoring and China’s FengYun program
The European Commission launched the first-ever EU Space Strategy for Security and Defence, which includes a pilot for new EO governmental service as part of the evolution of Copernicus
The Strategic Roadmap developed under the FIREFORUM project reflects the research and innovation strategy, with the EC and Member State funding agencies in mind as the prime audience. Download the pdf version of the road map for the following sectors
BlackSky commissioned its newly launched satellites in less than a day, and integrated the data into its geospatial intelligence platform
dashboard of dashboards with climate-related indicators
Data from NOAA showed that greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) continued to rise rapidly in 2022, Data from NOAA also showed that the average ocean surface temperature at the beginning of April rose to unchartered levels potentially risk of extreme weather events due to climate change
Data from ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission showed low levels of soil moisture across Europe (see an example from France below) raising concerns about water supply, agriculture and energy production.
ESA’s SMOS, CryoSat and Swarm missions, which monitor soil moisture, ice and magnetic field respectively among other parameters, have been extended at least until the end of 2025
ESA’s HydroGNSS mission, which planned to measure climate variables like soil moisture using a technique called Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reflectometry, will now be made up of two satellites (instead of one)
Former NASA scientist and executive has joined the satellite image processing service unit launched by consulting firm, EY
UNEP MARS, will detect at least 40-50 episodes a month and make them public, with data provided by French startup, Kayrros and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON)
Maxar announced an update to its global basemap, which will now be available at 30 centimeters per pixel. Maxar is also diversifying into imaging other satellites providing data for space situational awareness - here’s an image of Landsat 8 from a Maxar satellite (joining companies like HEO Robotics and AxelSpace)
NASA’s GEDI mission, which collects LiDAR data from the ISS, was put in hibernation, but will continue to be operational until at least 2030
paper summarising the considerations of EO and artificial intelligence for building agriculture solutions in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Report from the UN found that more people are being affected by more disasters because decision-makers are failing to invest in risk mitigation
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission from NASA and CNES, which suffered a minor setback is now working as expected and downlinked its first images of water on the planet’s surface;
Tomorrow.ioannounced the launch of ‘Gale,’ the first generative AI product (think ChatGPT) dedicated to weather and climate for businesses and governments to easily identify key trends, risks and opportunities
BlackSky launched two high resolution optical imagery satellites with Rocket Lab, marking an end to its Gen-2 version (90 cm), before moving onto its Gen-3 satellites (50 cm) from 2024
China launched four commercial weather satellites with GNSS radio occultation instruments, part of the Tianmu-1 constellation
Descartes Labs was selected to be one of the technology partners by Comtech, a satellite telecommunications solutions provider
Spire entered into a long-term agreement with Switzerland-based ch-aviation, an airline insights platform to supply global flight analytics from its constellation of satellites with ADS-B sensors. Spire Global and PlanetiQ, both flying radio occultation instruments, won follow-on Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity contracts by NOAA to compete for orders worth $59M
The US National Reconnaissance Office awarded contract extensions to Aurora Insight (now owned by Maxar), HawkEye360, Kleos Space and Spire to evaluate radio-frequency data from their satellites (it looks like Terran Orbital and Umbra missed out after they were selected last year)
The UK Geospatial Commission released a new digital map of underground pipes and cables in the UK
The TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution) instrument from NASA aimed at measuring air pollution in North America, will launch later this week hosted on an Intelsat communication satellite
Google awarded a $5M grant to the World Resources Institute as part of its Impact Challenge to study extreme heat and adaptation techniques, a project that will use EO among other sources
NOAA has requested $6.8B in funding for FY 2024, an increase of roughly $450M for future weather satellite programs after reduced funding in 2023
Thales Alenia Space won a contract from ESA to supply five SAR satellites and one optical satellite for the Italian EO constellation, IRIDE, worth €142M along with options for more orders
US’ National Reconnaissance Office awarded six study contracts worth $300,000 each for hyperspectral satellite imagery to BlackSky, HyperSat, Orbital Sidekick, Pixxel, Planet, and Xplore;
vorteX-io, a French startup received (in French) a grant of €2.5M from the European Innovation Council to create the first European flood and drought forecasting service with in-situ monitoring sensors
IPCC report, look no further than this piece from CarbonBrief
A SAR satellite from Iceye, purchased with the donations from Ukrainians, has helped detect and destroy thousands of pieces of Russian military equipment in five months of use
Corteva Agriscience, one of the leading agriculture firms is collaborating with Ukrainian EO company, EOS Data Analytics to research the use of satellite imagery for crop monitoring applications
Japanese EO company Axelspace announced partnerships with Space Compass, a venture building space data relay networks and Tokio Marine Holdings, an insurance firm, along with a new round of undisclosed funding
contributions from Terrawatch Space
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