A paradigm shift is under way for the earth observation industry. Today, low cost data continues to enter the marketplace and drive prices down. This is wonderful news for users, and we believe this is good for us too, particularly as low cost data enable analytics services. Since inception, UrtheCast has had the core belief that the democratization of Earth Observation (EO) data will enable never seen applications and will allow for wholly new expansion into multiple domains not yet served by Earth Observation data. But how can democratization of Earth Observation data truly be accomplished? At its core, reducing barriers to data utilization is the key. There are multiple barriers to address, and all facets must be addressed to serve existing and new customers with the new flood of data coming.

One barrier is costs. While imaging and delivering petabytes of data has technical challenges, the core challenge is delivering this data affordably. Since inception, governments have taken on the burden of affordability by providing several free scientific quality missions and making this data available to users. For the past 50 years USGS’s Landsat missions, ESA’s Sentinel missions, and NOAA’s climate missions have all enabled a new realm of science to which we have all enjoyed and benefited. For commercial businesses to thrive, the industry must serve a gap that is not met by this freely available data, traditionally this has been higher spatial resolution. Additionally, with the advent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), ultra-low-cost competitor technology has emerged. These market factors drive the cost down on all spatial resolutions of EO data.

But cost is only one factor, 8 years ago Deimos-1, was launched with a humble spectral and spatial resolution. It quickly brought value to market by providing two core competencies not served in the marketplace – coverage and revisit. This is achieved with three spectral bands, 20 meter resolution and a massive 600km swath and quick revisit. The value is clear and realized by the quickly crowded data market. Governments and Industry constellations of low cost satellites have begun to better serve new and existing markets with high availability data. Today, with more and more data coverage, users are in a position today to image the earth every day. Imaging the earth is no longer enough, what sets one mission apart from another, why do users choose one sensor over another?

It is not enough to have an image of the earth every day. The data contained in those images must be representative of the land surface, they must be comparable in time and space, and they must be relatable to the existing scientific approaches to using this data. This presents challenges to data providers. How do we enable massive coverage, revisit, resolution, and scientific quality while maintaining and affordability level that keeps barriers so low that access and utilization is maintained?
At UrtheCast, we believe UrtheDaily is the answer to this need. Inspired from the success of Deimos-1 and the quality of Sentinel-2, UrtheDaily will surpass competitors by focusing on these challenges head on. UrtheDaily is a constellation of identical satellites, designed from the ground up to image the entire earth’s land surface, daily (excluding Antartica). UrtheCast is harnessing decades of experience in Earth Observation to design a system the that will deliver un-paralleled data quality and coverage to the market, while maintaining low cost. This talk will explore the associated challenges from sensor design and calibration to utilization of cloud resources that reduce technical barriers far enough to truly democratize Earth Observation Data.

Space assets have become more accessible due to radical price reduction due to miniaturization of sensor- and satellite platform technology, which has enabled significantly lower launch and development costs. The price development has enabled many new business models and attracted to EO (Earth Observation) upstream business many new entrepreneurs. The first wave of new, radically smaller EO satellites were produced by private sector to enable real-time imaging with optical instruments; however, microwave remote sensing has been following rapidly the same development. New instruments provide already now significantly improved monitoring capability, especially over northern and polar region, as microwave data can be acquired in nearly all weather, lighting and seasonal conditions, including during polar night and constant cloud cover.

The Iceye X1 is the first radically smaller EO SAR satellite with mass only 70 kg and price which is only fraction of previous SAR missions. The satellite was launched on January 12, 2018, by the Indian PSLV rocket to mid-day sun synchronous 500 km orbit. After a very short commissioning phase, the satellite started to operate in the imaging mode and produced the first hundred images in less than a month. The satellite is to be followed by more satellites in 2018-2019, with a plan to have a representative constellation of 9 satellites by the end of 2019.

Here, we assess the potential of imagery acquired by the Iceye X1 sensors in several traditional EO application scenarios, focusing on change detection methodologies.
We concentrate on four demonstration sites (see Figure 1) with SAR imagery acquired in Stripmap imaging mode, offered for the data quality assessment in the framework of ESA organized Data familiarization phase. We focus on several potential applications such as urban, agricultural and forest area monitoring, and vessel tracking.

The urban test site is represented by Houston metropolitan area. This city is one of the most populous in the United States, conveniently located on the gulf coastal plain. Much of the city was built on forested land, marshes, swamp, or prairie. The scene was acquired on 02 February 2018, with central coordinates 29°49'12"N 95°13'12"W.

The agricultural test site is represented by an intensively managed suburban cropland area located on the seaside in south-eastern China. The test site features mixed agricultural and vegetated areas along with district settlements of the city of Shantou, on the eastern coast of Guangdong. The data take was performed on 02 March 2018. Central coordinates are 23°18'36"N 116°33'00"E.

The forested monitoring application is represented by a test site located in South Eastern Asia, on eastern part of the Island of Sumatra, Indonesia, and features mostly rainforest area along with several palm tree plantations. Central coordinates are 0°18'59"N 102°54'36"E. The site is covered primarily by broadleaf evergreen forest but features several actively managed plantation areas and, to a lesser extent, cropland. The area is characterised by near permanent cloud cover making it nearly impossible to monitor forest activities and change detection with optical satellite instruments. The scene was acquired on 01 March 2018.

Vessel tracking area. This test site (central coordinates 1°03'36"N 103°54'00"E) includes the Port of Singapore, Singapore Strait and partly Riau Archipelago, thus covering the world's busiest shipping lane. The scene acquired on 10 February 2018, might provide an insight on suitability and potential of the ICEYE stripmap imagery for monitoring vessels and updating maritime status information.

The BigDataCube project aims at advancing the innovative datacube paradigm – i.e., analysis-ready spatio-temporal raster data – from the level of a scientific prototype to preparing commercial Earth Observation (EO) services. To this end, the European Datacube Engine (in database lingo: ”Array Database System”), rasdaman, has been installed on the public German Copernicus hub, CODE-DE, as well as in the commercial cloud environment of cloudeo AG to offer datacube analytics services and to federate both, thereby demonstrating an integrated public/private service.

Started in January 2018 with a runtime of 18 months, BigDataCube has complemented the batch-oriented Hadoop service already available on CODE-DE with interactive datacube capabilities offering "any query, any time, on any size", strictly based on open geo standards and federated with other data centers. On this platform novel, specialized services can be established by third parties in a fast, flexible, and scalable manner.

To this end, several features crucial for commercial services had to be added, such as access control (in particular in face of the automated distributed processing), quota, billing, as well as tuning to the specific cloud configuration of CODE-DE. The result shows federation of rasdaman installations on CODE-DE, cloudeo, and CreoDias; several data centers have expressed their interest in joining, such as German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD), EURAC Alps Datacube, and Alfred-Wegener-Institut (AWI). Based on the technology platform, best practices for mixed federations are being established in preparation of extending the results of BiDataCube into a common European Datacube Federation on which individual value-adding services can rapidly be established by third parties.

BigDataCube is supported by the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Near real-time access to data has grown increasingly important as our desire to receive and consume information on a near constant basis to support not just emergency situations, but also for what would be considered standard applications, grows.

It is no longer the case that such information is just required by defence or intelligence organizations. Near real-time satellite data is used increasingly to support activities related to oil & gas, mining, situational awareness and environmental monitoring. These applications as well as market intelligence allows companies to de-risk, improve cost efficiency and have a perspective on their asset in a way not always possible with ground or traditional survey alone.

Near real-time access to Synthetic Aperture Radar and Optical satellite datasets has been available for some time. The rapid access requirements, particularly for emergency applications has helped to drive its availability. However, with 24/7 acquisition and analysis capabilities, it is now possible to provide critical actionable information within timeframes better than 2 hours from acquisition, 365 days a year, and often better than 1 hour from image acquisition, for numerous satellites.

As future capabilities grow with new sensors, onboard processing, faster processors and increasingly automated analyses the availability of such information, and more, means a user does not have to wait for lengthy acquisition timeframes as was often the case in the past. This move to, what can be an almost instant access to products and services supports a range of applications and activities with an unprecedented readiness.

This presentation will show some examples of what can currently be achieved through KSAT's worldwide ground station network and how the future advancements in imaging, processing, storage and downlink of both optical and SAR will only continue to improve and widen our capabilities whilst challenging the way we as users think about and receive such data and information.

A high-quality environment can have a significant impact on the economic life of urban spaces and is therefore an essential part of any successful regeneration strategy. As cities increasingly compete with one another to attract investment, the presence of tranquillity spaces, good parks, squares and other public spaces becomes a vital business and marketing tool. In cities people consider scenes that include natural elements to be of higher visual quality than those with only man-made features. Higher property values, cleaner air, moderated storm runoff, reduced energy consumption, increase biodiversity, increase productivity, and improved health are some of the direct albeit tangible benefits and functions that urban nature and urban soundscape provides.
With that context in mind, Starlab went through an innovation development pathway to identify, define, develop, and validate potential services from Earth Observation data for specific markets within urban boundaries: Municipalities, Real Estate, Retail, Construction markets. A set of public funded projects supported the opportunity through feasibility study and proof-of-market activities: ESA STREET HEALTH, InnovateUK UNIQUE. The proof-of-market supported our activities of getting commitment from potential customers and, through the feasibility study, develop a Minimum Valuable Product (MVP), corresponding to the real user needs, for future customer prospection and service development.
The initial idea came from the request from a particular customer, Barcelona city, parks and garden department, to monitor tree health from space, restraining tree inspection to unhealthy specimens. After, a successful proof-of-concept in collaboration with the user, the ESA STREET HEALTH project supporting the development of an MVP for urban forest health monitoring in urban areas. The Proof-of-market concluded the low willingness to pay from such customers as a low priority in the budget lines, even if the service might provide substantial benefits. Such results helped us to pivot to other markets, with the objective to exploit the same technology.
The InnovateUK UNIQUE project proposed to support principally UK Real Estate portals in extending their set of features to evaluate and present housing neighbourhood to their own customers. Through an API based models and map tile generators, the urban green information has been integrated and provided in a user-friendly way to attract more customers looking for their location for life. The conclusion of the proof-of-market were successful and provided the evidence of interest and direct benefits from Real Estate portal looking for competitive edge.
The development of the service, named GreenDEX, entered a piloting phase prior production implementation with a direct customer, a real estate company: AMAT Immobiliaris. The green index of geo-localized housing infrastructures, and surrounding areas is evaluated and integrated into AMAT online portal to support housing research and customer decision-making process regarding neighbourhood vegetation distribution. As such, the service reached the Technology Readiness Level corresponding to commercialization activities.

Recently we developed a novel way to map high resolution soil moisture at any place on the Earth by combining data from different satellites, including ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel constellation. With a spatial resolution of 100 m and daily observations this is ideal data input for the agribusiness and much cheaper and easier to apply than ground sensors.
Agricultural models which are often used in the agricultural sector take in massive amounts of data and use powerful software analytics to help predict what will happen in the future. These models are algorithms that attempt to imitate a complex biological environment, which are used to explain, understand and improve the overall performance of the biological system.
Here we show how our satellite soil moisture service can improve the predictability of these models by improving the quality of key data input, thus offering unprecedented opportunities for improving crop yield and reducing both water and pesticide usage at the same time. We are targeting suppliers of the agricultural models in various domains: within the agri/food industry, reinsurance, water management services, and knowledge institutes.
Our soil moisture data service is disclosed daily via an Application Programming Interface (API) and enable the user to receive data in whatever format they prefer. We will present three use cases where the added value of our soil moisture service is demonstrated in a commercial setting. 1) A case where our satellite soil moisture data products are used to improve crop yield prediction for numerous crops. 2) a case where our satellite soil moisture products form the basis of an operational index-based crop insurance in Kazakhstan, and 3) a case where our satellite soil moisture products are used to improve irrigation practices in Mozambique, Cambodia and Indonesia.
These three use cases are clear examples on how satellite soil moisture can be used to further improve and support agricultural practices.