It seems that the spirit of co-operation and collaboration has gripped the Earth Observation (EO) industry this week, with a number of companies announcing new partnerships in the last week:

ICEYE

Last week, the Finnish company, ICEYE, announced an agreement with Bayanat, a United Arab Emirates geospatial analysis solutions company, in collaboration with Emirati fleet operator Yahsat, to develop a five-satellite synthetic aperture radar constellation. This is to enhance the remote sensing and EO national capabilities for the United Arab Emirates, with data to be used for applications such as cartography, change detection, geospatial analysis and develop AI algorithms. The first satellite in the constellation is due to be launched in the first quarter of next year.

Loft Orbital

The United States based company, Loft Orbital, has announced a Memorandum of Understanding with Arabsat, on behalf of all 22 Arab League member countries, to work together to use Loft orbital’s infrastructure to provide EO services including developing future missions. The announcement indicated that potential applications include monitoring for services such as agriculture, transportation, border, maritime, and environmental aspects.

Planet Labs

This week Planet Labs has announced an extension of its involvement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) through a number of new strategic partnerships. These include with:

• Deajeon, a South Korea-based startup SI Analytics, which uses its own AI processes applied to satellite data to undertake a variety of change detection products.
• Synthetaic, a United States based AI startup which began working with Planet last year with their RAIC (Rapid Automatic Image Categorization) product, which automates the analysis of geospatial imagery. They are now looking to add object detection analytics to an area of interest of Planet data and include change alerts.

While last week it was announced that the RapidAI4EO Consortium has released one of the largest EO training datasets for machine learning. Under the sponsorship of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, RapidAI4EO established a number of projects looking towards the next generation of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) product. This one was undertaken by the consortium partners Planet Labs and Vision Impulse, a spin-off of German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.

The released dataset used a combination of Sentinel-2 and Planet data and covers half-a-million locations across Europe. There is data available within the dataset every five days for two years. Vision Impulse created monthly cloud-free Sentinel-2 mosaics, and then this was combined with Planet labs data every five days at 3 m spatial resolution. The dataset is to be made available on Radiant Earth’s Source Cooperative data publishing utility, which is currently in beta testing. As we’ve written previously, we are involved in various activities with machine learning, in particularly about training datasets which are such a crucial element, and are exciting to see what this dataset can offer.

It is interesting to see these further moves from Planet Labs, who are continuing to transform themselves from a satellite data provider to an EO solution provider.

China

At the weekend, China launched two EO satellites from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center via the Long March 2C rocket. The two satellites, known as Macau Science Satellite 1A (MSS-1A) and Macau Science Satellite 1A (MSS-1B), have been developed jointly by the China National Space Administration and Macau University of Science and Technology, and aim to monitor and better understand changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.

The two satellites carry different instruments with the MSS-1A carries a Coupled Dark State Magnetometer, Flux Gate Magnetometer, Energetic Electron Spectrometer, and Vector Field Magnetometer; while the MSS-1B will only be carrying a Energetic Electron Spectrometer and Solar X-Ray Detector.

The magnetometers on MSS-1A will measure the strength and direction of the magnetic field, while MSS-1B will monitor the wider space environment, including high-energy particles and X-rays from the sun. The data collected is expected to help scientists understand how the Earth’s magnetic field evolves operates over time

Also launched on the same rocket was Luojia 2-01. This is a Ka-band synthetic aperture radar EO satellite built by the Wuhan University with a spatial resolution of 0.5 m in spotlight mode, and 1 m in multi-angle mode.

Summary

It is interesting to see how different organisations are evolving in the EO sector, and how companies are recognising that working together is more effective than being a lone wolf. It will be fascinating to see if this continues and whether there will be spate of mergers and acquisitions or whether strategic partnerships and collaborations are the way forward.