Persistent Responsive Real-Time Earth Observation small satellite constellation mission (PERTEO) was a study dedicated to providing a global democratic service to support disaster management. Earth observation and satellite-based communications play a key role in supporting disaster management targeting responsiveness and the persistence of the service. In the terminology of on-demand Copernicus services, responsiveness is determined by the lead-time and latency. The persistence is determined by the availability and by the revisit time of the service.

The main objective of the project was to select the right IMU for our Future GNSS Receiver Unit (GRU). Two IMU were selected from their datasheet : µ-UMI-IC-HP from Litef and STIM318 from Sensonor. These 2 IMU were submitted to hard characterization tests applicable to our Launchers (and
HAPS) application.

'Don't try this at home' (named after one of the AI ships from I.Banks Culture series) is a concept demonstrating the benefits of having a cognitive cloud computing infrastructure in space. Such an infrastructure will provide a comprehensive and scalable set of commercial services to EO sensors and space-based data providers. It enables several applications by efficiently collecting and fusing information on target objects from observations of different platforms at various wavelengths, resolutions, and times. As a result, it leads to timely, precise information.

The market for life‐extension services for geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites is expected to remain healthy for the foreseeable future: over the last 20 years, an average of 22 new GEO satellites were launched per year. In total, ClearSpace expects there will be 370 potential client satellites that will reach their end of life due to the limited fuel they have remaining over the 2026–2041 period. ClearSpace believes a strong market penetration rate is feasible, as more than 30% of all the potential satellites belong to just seven satellite operators.

Recent studies have shown that remote sensing of floating marine plastic litter (MPL) is feasible from unmanned aerial systems, aircraft and satellite missions. However, in the infrared (IR) spectrum, water is a strong light absorber which makes the spectral detection and discrimination of plastics challenging. Additionally, MPL is often covered with living organisms and it is unclear what impact different thickness of biofouling may have on the spectral reflectance of floating plastic.

This activity developed high-performance data compression software with embedded data analysis features for radio-frequency, multi-band images and video. It offers excellent compression ratios and quality levels with very small computing requirements, which even allow for real-time operation on modest processors. Tests on data from ESA's OPS-SAT satellite reveal image ratios over 1:10 with excellent visual quality, and radio-frequency ratios over 1:3 with nearly identical spectrograms thanks to a smart lossy approach.

Many use cases for insight generated in orbit require the integration and calibration of raw data from multiple instruments and vantage-points – a future vision sometimes referred to as ‘hybrid observation’. Such a capability would be a foundational requirement in the processing chain for rapid follow-up observations especially when we need to estimate quantitative variables (e.g. soil moisture or water pollutants).

In the ocean, transport and mixing processes tend to disperse matter in suspension over wide spatial (~100 km) and long temporal (~month) scales. Fronts appear at the boundary between water masses with different properties and are caused by diverse oceanic features and processes, including bottom topography. Frontal structures include tidal mixing fronts, shelf-break fronts, upwelling fronts, estuarine fronts, plume fronts, fronts generated by convergence or divergence of water masses, and frontal eddies (Acha et al. 2015; Largier 1993).

The D2OPS activity started with the goal of applying MBSE practices to enable digital continuity between design and operations. This study involves the following main activities:

The Ka-band frequency (35 GHz) is becoming increasingly attractive for spaceborne remote sensing applications. Unlike other radar bands, the Ka-band enables the development of compact high resolution interferometric instruments and embarking the payloads on a single platform. This creates unique new opportunities in Earth observation science and civil security applications, for instance in monitoring the changing cryosphere, generating high resolution maps of ocean currents and ship and vehicle detection.