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
1. Contractual Stuff: Funding, Contracts and Deals 💰
Funding
- Satellogic announced a $30M strategic investment from a crypto fund which should provide operating liquidity and financial flexibility for the firm;
Contracts
- Open Cosmos won a €3.4M contract from the Spanish state of Catalonia for launching a small satellite with EO and IoT payloads;
- The UK Space Agency announced contract awards for international space projects worth £13M in total, which includes at least two EO projects for water quality monitoring and greenhouse gas emission monitoring;
- Satlantis received a contract from its parent company Encino Environmental Services to provide exclusive satellite-based methane monitoring data from its constellation;
- SuperSharp, a Satlantis-owned startup received £2m in projects to develop thermal infrared satellite payloads for urban and agriculture applications;
- Kongsberg was awarded a contract by the Norwegian government to build and launch satellites for acquiring satellite maritime surveillance data.
2. Strategic Stuff: Partnerships and Announcements 📈
Announcements
Software-defined satellite manufacturer ReOrbit announced that its upcoming launch will demonstrate secure space-to-space and space-to-ground data transfer for EO missions;
Polish EO-focused edge computing firm KP Labs announced the release of the first images from its satellite with on-board processing capabilities;
To learn more about edge computing, check out the subscriber-only deep dive from TerraWatch.
Partnerships
- Planet is partnering with utility firm Pacific Gas & Electric to use its data for vegetation management applications;
- EO platform SkyFi announced partnerships with Enabled Intelligence and True Elements to integrate water data analytics and labelled EO datasets.
3. Interesting Stuff: More News 🗞️
The Emirate of Sharjah’s utility Sharjah Electricity, Water and Gas Authority has integrated EO for detecting water leaks on infrastructure in its region;
A Czech-based space firm plans to build nanosatellites in Rwanda focusing on acquiring data for agriculture-related applications;
SpaceX launched a U.S. military weather monitoring satellite, as the agency hopes to fill the gaps left by the weather satellites nearing end-of-life
For more, check out my analysis on the state of weather satellites and why they barely get any attention.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that March 2024 is the tenth month in a row to be the hottest for the respective month in the ERA5 data record, going back to 1940;
NASA is now publicly distributing data from its recently launched PACE mission with measurements of ocean health and air quality.
4. Click-Worthy Stuff: Check These Out 🔗
- This piece that discusses how satellite-based altimetry data is used for mapping the seafloor, which is only 25% done at this point;
- This collection of images from geostationary NOAA satellites that captured the solar eclipse over North America.
EO Summit: Keynote Speaker
I am super excited and honoured to announce that Dr. Dalia Kirschbaum, Director of Earth Science Division at NASA Goddard, will give the keynote at the EO Summit, discussing NASA's Earth Action strategy and other initiatives to collaborate with the commercial EO sector.
We will also have a cohort of NASA representatives attending the event. More on that soon!
💸 Tip: Save €100 and book your tickets for €299. Prices go up soon! 💸
One Discussion Point
5. Why an EO Summit?
I founded TerraWatch Space 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 of initiatives, if executed well, seems like a no-brainer for me. Why?
Motivation
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 significant role within the space and EO sectors. I love attending them every year and look forward to catching up with the EO and the space community. But the state of conferences especially relevant for the commercial EO sector made me ponder …
- 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?
So, I decided to embark on that research. You may have come across a very comprehensive list of conferences, workshops and other events in the EO sector, that I had put together and shared (one last year and one this year) - that was not by accident. I was trying to answer the questions above and see if any of the 60+ events in the EO sector over the year tick the points mentioned.
Conclusion
I could not find a conference that focuses on satellite data and its applications, that an existing/potential commercial 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.
While there are numerous vertical-specific events for agriculture, forestry, insurance, mining, energy, utilities and the like, which serve an important purpose of bringing those industries together, none of them place any strategic importance on EO (nor they should). However, seeing the current levels of EO adoption for commercial use cases, I am convinced that we need to bring the users of EO from different markets together in the same forum to enable the cross-pollination of ideas and learn about best practices for adopting EO. This also includes investors and policymakers, both of whom are trying to navigate the EO ecosystem and understand how they can add value.
So, what is EO Summit?
A conference to bring the global EO industry and users of EO together, to discuss enterprise and climate-related applications, with two fundamental principles:
To be user-centric, not provider-centric and to be application-focused, not technology-focused.
If you want to read more about my rationale for EO Summit, read my blog post. I hope to see some of you readers of the newsletter in real life in London soon!
Scene from Space
One visual leveraging EO
6. Thermal Data for Urban Monitoring
This week we have got a thermal infrared satellite image of the city of Fresno, California, captured by London-based SatVu which plans to launch a satellite constellation for high-resolution thermal datasets.
The image clearly shows variations in surface temperature across neighbourhoods in Fresno, with a noticeably cooler area which correlates with a park and wooded district known as Fig Gardens. This indicates the importance of green spaces in mitigating urban heat and hints at socio-economic disparities within different neighbourhoods.
SatVu is a Silver Sponsor for EO Summit and will be presenting at the event. Register to meet the company representatives and learn more about them.
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