Nebula Public Library

Marine litter causes enormous damage to ecosystems and has become a concern for human health, since plastic has been found entering the food chain. 

To try to solve this, research and industrial communities are now working on systems for detecting and/or capturing marine litter debris. Satellite-based detection approaches, in particular, are still in the early stage of their development and need to be validated with ground truth data and observations.

Water resources management has become a challenging problem worldwide, especially in developing countries. The lack of information on land cover monitoring has a huge impact on the water resources management, since it may hamper the collection, treatment and distribution of water for human consumption and agricultural development. To fulfil this demand, Earth Observation (EO) data has been used in African countries to map land cover of large and often inaccessible areas, providing useful information on qualitative and quantitative land cover changes.

Over the course of this study we have convinced ourselves of the benefits of a reference architecture in particular and of an end-to-end simulator in general. Our arguments have mostly been technical ones, but the reality is that it can only be sold to the space science community by successfully making the case that it improves the science return of the mission.

GNSSBICS is a feasibility study carried out in the frame of the ESA’s General Studies Programme (GSP)
by DEIMOS-Space, Deimos-Engenharia and ESA.
This activity investigated what G/S infrastructure would be necessary to develop a System, named as GNSS-BICS (GNSS Bias Calibration System), in charge of providing, under demand, the GNSS MEO S/C SISBAF (Signal-In-Space Biases Amongst Frequencies), from GNSS observations gathered by GNSS multi-frequency receivers on-board LEO satellites (potentially from different missions).