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Plastic marine litter is a very complex global environmental issue, with plastic litter at the sea surface representing only a small fraction of plastic entering the sea. In this respect, the BLUE project investigated the potential of diverse LIDAR techniques (backscatter, fluorescence, Raman) to address the detection of plastic litter not only floating on the sea surface, but also suspended in the first few metres under the surface, with also a focus on detecting microplastics and discriminating plastic from other types of litter. The approach adopted was four-fold:

CubeSats have the potential to revolutionise Earth observation from space by exploring different operating points in terms of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution. However, physical limitations, mostly in terms of size, prevent them from obtaining high-quality images. OPS-SAT, while characteriaed by a small form factor, provides an impressively capable and flexible hardware/software platform for executing demanding machine learning algorithms (inference stage).

The project, part of the ESA Discovery Campaign on Remote Sensing of Plastic Marine Litter, developed a method to estimate floating macroplastic accumulation and transport rates in rivers using remote sensing. It combined the detection of floating water hyacinths using Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 with in-situ estimates of macroplastic densities carried by this invasive aquatic weed. Water hyacinths typically form large patches of several meters of width and length, and can thus be detected from space.

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.