Earth Observation from Space A ddressing increasing needs in a disruptive environment

Earth Observation fromSpaceAddressingincreasingneeds in a disruptive environment Philippe Delclaux, consultant May 16th, 2013 EOS for Economic Development

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation • Since ERTS (then Landsat) launched in 1972, the EO Satellites have benefitted from: • the progress of the technology increased performances, lower costs, • the lowering of the barriers set up by the governmental authorities regarding the details which may be observed on the ground. • The resolution of the instruments has dramatically improved • optical camera: from 60 x 80m (ERTS then Landsat, 1972) to 41 x 41cm (GeoEye1), • radar: from 25 x 25m (Seasat, 1978) to 1 x1m (TerraSAR-X, Cosmo-Skymed). • The development of the Information Technology opened the door for setting up services simplifying the access to the data.

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation • The distribution of data on a commercial basis by a few actors (like for SPOT in 1986) entailed a business approach: • led to market "Geo-Information", • "Remote Sensing" stayed confined in the academic world. • 30 years later, GoogleEarth, GPS and mobility applications: • moved the use of Geo-Information from the restricted professional community to the general public (emerging "neo-geographers"), • by capillarity, made a much broader professional community, including decision makers, familiar with professional use of Geo-Information, • led to add a geographic component to every information stored in any data base. 1989

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation • The commercial approach led to focus on the service to the client: • response to requests for acquisition of images by the spacecrafts, • access to the archive: metadata, catalogue on line, • access to the data: from the magnetic tape to the on line delivery. • The progress of the Information Technology has been the main enabler: • Internet, • standards (OGC, ISO), • capacity to turn image data into useful information.

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation 1995

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation METADATA 1986

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation DATA DELIVERY 1992

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation DATA DELIVERY On line delivery 2001

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation DATA DELIVERY 2008 Through Web Services

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation INFORMATION & SERVICES List of monitored sites Sites monitoring Acquisition Schedule Observations Level of activity Quick look of the image 2006 Buy image

40 years of EOS: from Remote Sensing to Geoinformation INFORMATION & SERVICES Precision Farming 2010

EOS: the landscape in 2013 • A wide range of offers: • resolution from 40 cm to few meters, optical and radar, • constellations which offer a striking capacity to collect images, in reasonable time frame, • services more and more close to the client's needs, • increasing involvement of the cloud approach. • Various economic models: • the governmental systems: investment and operations bore by tax payers  data available at reduced price • mixed approach: most investments paid by government, operations covered by market sales (SPOT 1 to 5, Pleiades, TerraSAR-X); a variant to this is the Anchor Tenant model, mostly practiced in North America. • fully private funding (the investements and the operations). This is the approach for SPOT 6 & 7. • A market much more mature, and aware of geo-information, • Other sources of geo-information (e.g. the crowd sourcing).

The challenges • The race to the resolution has several consequences: • for the spacecrafts, reduced swath (could have an impact on the capacity to cover large areas), • increasing volume of data to be managed, archived, processed and distributed, • tickling national homeland security policies and starting to tackle privacy issues. • For the fully private EO systems: • the Return on Investment must be achieved in a somehow "unfair"competitive environment from government funded EOS. • The competition coming from crowd sourcing • e.g. OpenStreetMap

The opportunities • Improved resolution: • reduced swath compensated by the agility of the spacecrafts and their number, entailing a capability to be responsive to the client's requests, • innovative solutions on the ground to cope with growing data volume, • many applications benefitting from the details caught on the ground. • Return on Investment: • driver for innovation: new services, new business models, • necessity to expand the market base (private professional clients, beyond the traditional governmental market segment). • The crowd sourcing: • certified geometrical quality offered by EOS can be used as a referee to assess what has been collected by the internet communities, • satellite capability to capture information globally with an even guaranteed quality is welcomed by many professional applications.

The future (1/3) • Earth Observation Satellites have unique capabilities: • ability to fly everywhere in the world and to capture every piece of earth on request, without administrative barrier, • revisit capability to follow changes and to monitor human activity, • integrity and quality of the data, to be used as a reference in many domains , • capacity to cover large areas and to satisfy customer requests in time thanks to agility of spacecrafts flying in constellations.

The future (2/3) • Spatial, spectral or temporal resolution? • Even if the sensor technology enables better spatial resolution, some barriers, at least in the civil domain, limits the ambitions (homeland security or privacy issues). • Making spectral bands more specific to given objects? • Video camera on board could offer new dimension, by following high frequency phenomena, either from the current low orbits or from the geostationary ones: revisit offers change monitoring whilst video adds movement.

The future (3/3) • Services delivering information rather than data and images: • a solution to the dramatic growth of the number of pixels: information is much lighter than the giga-pixels in an image (the pipes to deliver images have still narrow bandwidth on many customer sides), and easier to consume, • possibility to host applications on the cloud, near the data archive, • web service approach with relevant standards enabling interoperability and facilitating fusion of data, • ecosystems integrating data delivery and applications (from data users or from vendors) with innovative business models to hide the complexity.

PLEIADES SPOT 5 SPOT 4 SPOT 3 SPOT 2 SPOT 1 Conclusions • EOS data market matures, and private market segment must expand beyond traditional government one. • Information Technology evolution has been the driver during 40 years for innovating solutions to simplify access to data/information from EOS: this will keep going, for a high quality level of service to the clients. • From data to information and services: a new eco-system. Main selling argument 15 years ago

Earth Observation from Space A ddressing increasing needs in a disruptive environment