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The Pixalytics weekly blog has been on hiatus for the last three months, but now we’re back!

Our restart is to co-inside with the celebration of our 9^th Birthday, which took place at the start of May. We’re delighted and slightly surprised, to have reached this mark. Particularly given that statistics indicate that 67% of start-up’s fail to reach their 10^th birthday, so we’re targeting being on the 33% who do next year! Everyone knows that the last twelve months have been like no other, and we’ve had to adapt, evolve and change like everyone else.

We’ve been lucky that we’ve been able to carry on working through the year and so, like the majority of the country, we’ve adopted home working as our modus operandi. Last year we had staff based in Scotland and Wiltshire, and towards the end of the summer there was only Sam and myself based in Plymouth – so we moved to a smaller office on the Plymouth Science Park. It was all a bit rushed to get it completed before the second lockdown, and as a consequence, it was very much throw everything in and shut the door so we’ve still not properly unpacked or sorted the office out. We’ve been in a few times for work, data moving and restarting IT kit – but not yet for sorting.

We also spent a lot of the last year working on the Earth Observation for Sustainable Aggregate Supply Project (EO4SAS) in Kenya which has been fantastic, our only disappointment was that we never got to visit the country. Our in-country partners NIRAS Africa and Nairobi Design Institute were wonderful in supporting the work on the ground, and the UK partners Satellite Applications Catapult, Chatham House, University of Plymouth, together with support from the British Geological Society, meant that Discovery Project was very successful ‘discovering’ lots of information and ideas! We’ve now just got to work out how to develop the operational system!

That’s enough about us! What about Earth Observation (EO) satellite and space industries, what’s happened whilst we’ve been gone? Some, but no means everything, that caught our eye whilst we were away were:

• NASA talking to the industry about the sensors for the Landsat Next EO satellite, the successor to Landsat-9 which could be a single satellite, like its predecessors, or a constellation of small satellites expected to launched towards the end of the decade.
• SpaceX has put over 500 of their Starlink satellites into orbit since our last blog! Nine launches of 60 satellites, with the last being on Sunday.
• OneWeb, the company co-owned by the UK Government, has launched 72 satellites and has had a US$500M investment from the French satellite company Eutelsat who’ve taken a 24% ownership stake. It is suspected that the UK Government is hoping to be able to use the Eutelsat geostationary satellites as part of its future go-it-alone GPS.
• Swarm Technology launched another sixteen of its SpaceBEE picosatellites.
• Brazilian EO satellite Amazonia-1 was launched on 27th February.
• China launched another Gaofen satellite for its China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS).
• Six more Chinese Yaogan 9 satellites were launched in two batches of three, these are believed to ocean monitoring satellites for the military.
• Chinese Long March 5B booster rocket came back to Earth in an uncontrolled manner over the weekend. Despite the fears of danger, it mostly crashed into the Indian Ocean above the Maldives.
• Satellite images of the Suez Canal were plastered all over the media when it was blocked at the end of March.

That ends our catch-up blog and next week we’ll be back to posting our normally weekly musing!

Happy reading!