Pedestrian pontoon bridge across the New Danube, called the Ponte Cagrana, looking back to where the Living Planet was held in Vienna, Austria.
Following on from last week where I reviewed the beginning of the Living Planet Symposium, this week I’m summarising my experience of the remainder of the event.
For me Wednesday was a combination my oral presentation on the Space for Climate Observatory (SCO) endorsed SwedCoast-BlueCarb project, and EarthCARE day!
My oral presentation on the progress of the SwedCoast-BlueCarb project resulted in people coming up and talking to me about the project, their work, and the wider blue carbon and eelgrass ecosystems. I’ve got a lot of information and contacts to take back to the project!
EarthCARE is a relatively new ESA Earth Explorer mission, launched in May 2024, and is focused on understanding cloud and aerosol dynamics alongside the Earth’s radiation budget. I am involved with the mission as I’m part of a team within Telespazio UK who work on the calibration of three of its instruments, and it was great to finally meet in person everyone I have been talking to online. This work is part of what’s called the EarthCARE Data, Innovation and Science Cluster (DISC), which is responsible for ensuring that the best quality products are distributed to ESA. It’s great to have this inside view of a mission, actively trying to understand and improve the calibration of newly launched instruments.
Thursday saw the public announcement of NAIAD as one of the four new candidate ESA Scout missions and will focus on water quality in coastal and inland aquatic ecosystems. NAIAD is being led by SSTL with the University of Stirling, Pixalytics and Assimila, supporting with the science. For me, NAIAD is exciting as I’ve worked on water quality throughout my career, but I’ve often used missions not designed for aquatic applications. Pixalytics is leading on the Scene Generator element of the work which is part of the broader End to End Simulator and will be used to demonstrate that we can achieve the mission objectives. This proof is necessary to put the mission forward for the next stage, namely, getting the mission launched.
If you’ve looked at the link, you’ll see I’m not in the picture. This is because, at the time, I was on a panel for early-career researchers. This is one of the challenges of attending Living Planet – there is so much going on, you can’t always get to everything you want to! The panel session was organised by SENSE and ESA; it was amazing to find that the room had so many people packed in that no one else could get in the door. There were four of us on the panel from a variety of roles, we all talked our careers and tried to offer advice and support to the next generation. We also discussed how to overcome disappointment and that career paths often do not follow a straight line.
Despite Friday being the final day, it was no less busy. I chaired a session, representing Telespazio, with Leonardo De Laurentiis from ESA titled “New Space Missions Data Quality & Calibration/Validation” that focused on deriving high quality data from new space missions, both commercial small and cube satellites, and also featured a new space mission calibration site in Finland. Finally, I presented a poster on improving the data quality of hyperspectral missions.
Summary
Living Planet was an interesting, exciting, and inspiring week about all aspects of Earth Observation. It was great to catch up with old friends and meet fantastic new people! I had a wonderful time, and it will take me several weeks to work through all the information and contacts I gathered during my time in Vienna. If you’ve not been to one of these Symposium’s, I highly recommend you put it in your planner for 2028!
