Welcome to a new edition of ‘Last Week in Earth Observation’, containing a summary of major developments in EO from the last week and some exclusive analysis and insights from TerraWatch.
Four Curated Things
Major developments in EO from the past week
💰 Contractual Stuff: Funding, Contracts and Deals
Contracts
- Thales Alenia Space was awarded a contract by ESA to develop an agricultural digital twin component for sustainable, resilient agriculture;
- Planet signed a deal with ESA on behalf of the Greek Ministry of Digital Governance to complement the country's EO capabilities;
- Iceye won a contract from NATO to provide SAR data for its Situation Center.
📈 Strategic Stuff: Partnerships and Announcements
Announcements
- OroraTech launched the world’s first wildfire constellation of eight satellites, expected provide real-time wildfire detection;
- For more on EO for wildfire monitoring, check out the deep-dive.
- Maxar launched Raptor, a powerful software suite that enables autonomous drones to navigate and extract accurate ground coordinates in the absence of GPS, leveraging its archive of 3D satellite imagery.
- Thermal infrared EO startup Hydrosat released first images from its recently launched VanZyl-1 mission.
Partnerships
- European Space Imaging and Albedo are partnering to bring Albedo's very-high resolution (10 cm) satellite imagery to the European and North African market;
- Saudi Aramco and GHGSat are joining forces to use EO data to monitor and mitigate methane emissions.
🗞️ Interesting Stuff: More News
- NASA is developing an agricultural digital twin that could provide farmers with better agricultural productivity forecasts;
- Norway's NICFI initiative, which provided open access to Planet's high-resolution satellite imagery for deforestation monitoring, has ended;
- Italian national EO constellation, that had its first satellite launch recently, has delivered its first image.
🔗 Click-Worthy Stuff: Check These Out
- This article that serves a primer on EO, but features imagery from and information on Indian EO satellites (usually rare);
- This piece that digs into what AI foundation models incorporating EO data mean for land and carbon monitoring;
- This case study from Airbus explaining the role of red-edge band for monitoring tree health.
EO Summit: Registration Categories
📣 Unveiling the registration categories for EO Summit!
EO Summit is truly a user-focused Earth observation conference: we have made it easier and more affordable for the EO user community to attend the event.
What this means: If you are a user (or potential user) of satellite data or solutions working in the insurance, finance, agriculture, forestry, energy, utilities or environment sectors, you can now buy tickets to attend EO Summit for just $299.
If you are a non-profit or press/media, you can get complimentary passes to the conference. If you are a student or researcher, you can benefit from reduced prices. Tickets will go on sale next week - watch this space.
Why an EO Summit
TerraWatch is not an event management company, TerraWatch is not financially supported by any government or space agency, and the founder of TerraWatch is not a millionaire. So, why am I taking this incredible risk of organising a conference, in which I could end up losing money (touch wood, I won't)?
For TerraWatch, It Is A No-Brainer
I founded TerraWatch to demystify EO, with a vision of making EO mainstream. Every single effort, whether the strategic consulting services, the weekly newsletter, the EO market deep dives, or the infographics you may have come across, has been a step towards realising that vision.
Adding EO Summit to that list is a no-brainer for me, especially if we want to increase the awareness and adoption of EO among enterprise users.
Status Quo
Most conferences in the EO sector and the wider space industry can be summarised by a couple of one-liners.
“Space people presenting to space people and meeting space people.”
“A conference for those in the EO bubble, by those in the EO bubble.”
There is nothing wrong with the current set of conferences - they play a very specific and important role within the EO sectors. I love attending them every year and look forward to catching up with the EO and the space community. But this made me wonder …
How many conferences move the needle when it comes to increasing the awareness of EO and bridging the adoption EO gap among users?
How many current and potential commercial users of EO attend the existing set of conferences, workshops and other related events?
Which conferences are actually accessible to EO users, focus on EO applications (not technologies) and facilitate connections between the users and the EO sector?
Motivation for EO Summit
I could not find a conference that exclusively focuses on satellite data and its applications, that an existing/potential user of EO can go to, either to learn about the technology and market trends in the EO sector (or) to meet other users within their markets to learn about how they use and integrate satellite data within their organisations and compare notes.
Even more importantly, as the EO sector hopes to break into the commercial market and gain adoption among the end-users, there is no conference that EO professionals can attend to discover the use cases of EO, understand the significance of EO for end-user organisations and use those insights as they grow their business.
EO Summit: The Rationale
I was very clear about one thing from the get-go: to not do anything redundant. We already have far too many events, conferences and workshops in the world, and even more so within the niche EO/space sector (we already have 80+ conferences, see the list published by TerraWatch).
Here’s how EO Summit is different:
- Hear from the EO industry, but hear more from the users of EO,
- More applications, less technologies; more actual case studies, less assumptions,
- Independently organised and expertly curated program by TerraWatch, possibly the only exclusive EO advisory and market intelligence firm.
The Business Model
EO Summit is a community-supported event. I am organising this conference with the hope that I will be able to get back all the money that will be invested. So, the business model is typical of most events: Sponsorships & Registrations.
We already have over 15 sponsors sign up and we expect over 500 people at the conference, with at least over 200 from the user segment. I am confident that EO Summit will be the first EO conference you will have attended with a significant presence of users of satellite data or satellite-derived products, more so than any other event in the industry.
EO Summit tickets are on sale, reserve your place now!
Scene from Space
One visual leveraging EO
Understanding the Impact of the Earthquake in Myanmar
Last week's earthquake in Myanmar has already led to over 2,000 deaths, with the US Geological Survey reporting that even 10,000 is a possibility. Journalists have been using satellite images to do damage assessments, such as the one below. This video from the BBC digs into more details on how this is done using EO.
Until next time,
Aravind.
