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.
Some housekeeping: Happy September, everyone! Apologies, I could not send the regular weekly edition last Monday - the migration from Substack to Ghost that I wrote about last time took longer than expected, but it is now complete. You can see that the homepage for the newsletter looks a lot different (and I hope, better).
We made this migration to create a better reading experience for you, especially by improving the accessibility of the existing content. You can now easily access the analysis and insights published by category, including the infographics.
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Four Curated Things
Major developments in EO from the past week
💰 Contractual Stuff: Funding, Contracts and Deals
Funding
- Space Intelligence, a Scottish nature and carbon monitoring platform, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding;
Contracts
- Planet signed a contract with NATO to use Planet’s SkySat high-resolution satellite data to support NATO missions;
- EarthDaily Analytics won a contract worth $1.7M from MySpatial, a Malaysian geospatial service provider;
- The UK Space Agency awarded grants worth £2.5M in total to ten UK-based companies to trial new solutions that use EO to support transport and financial services sectors;
- Spire announced new contracts with the US Air Force worth $14M for detecting and tracking moving objects, the UK Space Agency worth £3.5M for developing and demonstrating hyperspectral microwave sounders and NASA with a $6.7M contract renewal for providing data under the CSDA programme.
📈 Strategic Stuff: Partnerships and Announcements
Partnerships
- UP42 is partnering with Planet and integrating data from its SkySat satellite constellation into UP42's platform;
- Indian energy firm Tata Power signed a strategic partnership with weather intelligence provider Tomorrow.io;
Announcements
- Defense firm Sierra Nevada Corporation plans to deploy a network of 20 satellites with radiofrequency monitoring sensors.
🗞️ Interesting Stuff: More News
- Experts warned that the US is falling behind in the satellite imaging race;
- NOAA's State of the Climate Report confirmed that global temperatures across land and the ocean, greenhouse gas concentrations and global sea level and ocean heat content all reached record highs in 2023;
🔗 Click-Worthy Stuff: Check These Out
- This article on how Canada’s 2023 wildfires produced emissions comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation;
- This paper that presents a new methodology based on multisensor, multispectral imagery to predict aboveground biomass and canopy height;
- This article that shows, based on analysis of satellite imagery, how the development of a Tesla gigafactory near Berlin has resulted in 500,000 trees being felled and the carbon emission trade-offs associated with this;
Earth Observation for Climate: Side Event during Climate Week NYC
We are organizing a side event focused on EO during Climate Week NYC on Sep 25. There will be panel discussions on the use of EO across three use cases: GHG Emission Monitoring, Carbon Markets, and Nature & Biodiversity.
The event is for everyone who would like to learn about the capabilities of EO for monitoring climate, with a multidisciplinary audience coming from different sectors (public, private, non-profit, investors, research, etc.) and sponsored by GHGSat, Planet, and Pixxel.
If you are attending Climate Week NYC and are interested in understanding the use of EO for climate, this event might be worth attending.
Scene from Space
One visual leveraging EO
Monitoring Wildfires with Thermal Sensors
The park fires in California, which burned over 1,700 square kilometers (670 square miles), were the state’s fourth-largest fire on record and its largest fire so far in 2024. Satellites on both low earth and geostationary orbits with optical imagers continuously captured the evolution of fire, while the ECOSTRESS instrument on the International Space Station measured the thermal infrared energy emitted from the Earth’s surface (land surface temperatures), showing the extent of the fire.
Until next time,
Aravind.
