NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using VIIRS and MODIS data from LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response and the Level 1 and Atmospheres Active Distribution System (LAADS) and Land Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE), and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Interesting reports from UK and US Government bodies this week into the Geospatial Strategy and NASA projects, and we’ll look at the issues related to the Earth Observation industry.

 UK Geospatial Strategy

A report was issued last week by the UK’s Geospatial Commission, which highlighted the progress being made in delivering the UK’s Geospatial Strategy and the actions it plans for the coming year.  The Strategy covers 2020 to 2025 and one of its mission aims is to ‘Improve Access To Better Location Data’ with an associated actions being to ‘Explore ways to rationalise the public sector’s procurement of Earth Observation data and services’.

This action is picked up in the plan for this year intending ‘Pilot access to commercial, Earth Observation-derived high-resolution data, to inform options for public sector data supply’. The Annual Plan notes that around 2,000 public sector organisations use aerial photography, through a collective access agreement, and they want to develop a similar agreement for commercial Earth Observation (EO) data. It is believed that such an agreement would widen the use of space-based data, deliver the best value for money and help share knowledge across the public sector. This is based on some research undertaken by the Satellite Applications Catapult into public sector demand for commercial EO data, which highlighted several barriers to its adoption including:

• Varying levels of technical understanding of EO data and service capability across public sector bodies, and how to maintain this in the rapidly maturing EO market.
• The high costs of some commercial high-resolution EO data, and the need for robust business cases for the investment.

Anyone who has worked in the industry for some time is unlikely to be surprised by these outcomes, particularly the cost issue. EO is not often in budgets at the start of the year, but sometimes as organisations are desperately trying to spend money before year-end, they do small pilot projects to demonstrate the benefits of EO. It is rare that this immediately translates into larger longer-term projects. So whilst we are delighted with any initiative to develop the market, it was interesting that the document has no mention of free-to-access data, nor how to encourage the uptake of EO skills in the public sector.

It was also interesting to see the Mayflower Autonomous Vessel crossing the Atlantic, which Pixalytics donated to, and we’ve written about before, highlighted as an EO Case Study.

14th Annual Assessment of Major NASA Projects

A report by U.S. Government Accountability Office was also released this week looking at Major NASA projects, which it noted were experiencing their largest collective cost and time overruns since these annual assessments began.

Whilst the pandemic did have an impact, it was not the major cause. Instead, it was three large projects: James Webb Space, Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft caused the outcomes. For EO projects, it was noted that Landsat 9 was successfully delivered 2 months ahead of schedule and $138.5 million below the cost estimate. Other EO projects are less positive:

• NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission has had its estimated launch date pushed back a year, and forecast costs have increased by 12% from the original estimate.
• Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission has had its launch date pushed back 4 months and forecast costs have increased 8.4% from the original estimate.
• Surface Water & Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is forecast to be 14 months behind schedule and forecast costs are up by 8.9%.

NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program

It was announced that Spire had been awarded a 12-month contract extension, worth $6 million, to continue being part of NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program which allows commercial data to be made available for scientific researchers to US federal bodies, NASA and Government-funded research. This could be a similar type of contract that the UK Geospatial Strategy develops to deliver the public sector access to high-resolution commercial imagery described above. The Spire contract is reported to include EO data from:

• Spire’s GNSS Grazing Angle Reflectometry data (GNSS-R), to measure sea ice extent, classification, altimetry, soil moisture, and ocean surface wind speed;
• Spire’s GNSS radio occultation (GNSS-RO) soundings to improve global weather forecasting accuracy;
• Space weather measurements to allow researchers to monitor the ionosphere and weather events in space.

All of these reports show the amount of money involved in the EO industry, and why value for money is a critical driver.