Welcome to another edition of Earth Observation Essentials, the free biweekly newsletter from TerraWatch covering key highlights from the EO market along with exclusive insights and analysis.
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📈 EO Market Highlights
Major developments in EO
📈 Safran, the French defense firm has acquired Kayrros' geospatial intelligence activities, after energy intelligence firm Energy Aspects acquired Kayrros' assets and operations related to its work in the energy sector. For Safran, this acquisition follows their acquisition of EO intelligence provider Preligens and making them a key player across the value chain.
That cross-market reach is probably why the IP attracted two separate buyers rather than one with Energy Aspects taking the energy arm and Safran the defence one. While in general, breadth can be considered a dilution of focus, in this case, it became the source of the value, proven by two major players paying (whatever they did) to own a piece of the same underlying technology.
🛰️ ESA has approved two Scout missions: Hibidis and SOVA-S, which will have faster development times leveraging commercial capabilities.
- Hibidis will carry an hyperspectral imager to monitor biodiversity while SOVA-S will provde near-global daily observations of gravity waves.
🤖 Planet launched a preview of their agentic geospatial AI tool that allows users to type queries and get results based on analysis of satellite imagery.
In the TerraWatch Pro newsletter last week, I analysed five reasons why GeoAI is not completely operational yet and in this week's edition, I digged into why some countries opt for multi-sensor EO satellites while others assemble their multi-sensor EO stack from different providers.
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💡 Insight Bytes
A quick dose of analysis from TerraWatch
Earth Observation for Parametric Insurance
Insurance has always worked the same way. Something bad happens, you file a claim, someone comes to assess what you lost, and eventually you get paid. The model is slow, expensive, and often disputed. Over the last two decades, a different model has emerged: parametric insurance. Instead of paying based on what an assessor verifies, it pays based on what a measurement says – if the measurement crosses an agreed threshold, then the payout is automatic.
Why EO Matters
EO is the engine of parametric insurance: every time a satellite gains the ability to measure a new variable at a new resolution at a new frequency, a category of risk becomes parametrically insurable. Soil moisture, vegetation health, flood extent, fire severity or sea surface temperature are a trigger for an insurance policy somewhere in the world, because some satellite(s) is measuring it.
Before satellites, parametric had to mainly rely on ground-based weather stations such as rainfall gauges, thermometers, wind sensors at fixed locations which limited the market to a handful of perils in places where stations happened to be dense enough. In other words, without EO, parametric was a small market built around weather stations, while with a growing number of EO satellites, parametric is now a fast-growing market.
The visual below illustrates, in a simplified manner, how this works in practice. A satellite measures the crop's health over the growing season. If the crop is healthy, nothing happens. If the crop seems stressed beyond an agreed threshold, the policy pays out automatically, without anyone visiting the field.
The recently published TerraWatch deep dive cover how parametric insurance works, the role of satellite data in expanding what can be insured, the players and use cases and its limits.
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EO Summit: Participating Organisations
Meet the participating organisations for EO Summit 2026 - spread across insurance, finance, energy, utilities, agriculture, environment, government and defence sectors, who will present real-world case studies of Earth observation through presentations and panels.
We built EO Summit as a user-focused, application-driven conference, one that was missing in the EO and space event calendar. For the third straight year, we continue to deliver on our promise.
Come meet the users of satellite data and geospatial on June 22!
Until Friday, May 29, we are offering a discounted ticket sale exclusively for TerraWatch newsletter subscribers.
Click on the registration link and use the code EOS26_TWSNL at checkout (the last step) to get a flat 20% discount on the registration fee.
🔍 Recommended Reads
Interesting links to check out
- Google DeepMind's new case study shows how its WeatherNext AI model accurately predicted the track and intensity of last year's Hurricane Melissa five days before landfall.
- ECMWF launched a new tool called Weather Replay that allows you to visualise weather conditions of the planet all the way back to 1940.
- Our new in-depth analysis on Vantor (previously Maxar) three years after they were acquired by a private equity firm for $6.4B.
🛰️ Scene from Space
One visual leveraging EO
The Case of the Dimming Night Lights
Recent analysis by NASA using nightlights data from VIIRS sensor on multiple satellites found that while some regions showed increase in artificial light at night, some others showed a reduction in light pollution due to energy conservation measures.
The map below shows changes in brightness across most of the inhabited world. Yellow and gold areas are where there has been more brightening during the study period, from 2014 to 2022, and purple areas are where there has been more dimming.
Until next time,
Aravind.
