This is the objective of the Telespazio Innovation Award, the first phase of Leonardo's Innovation Award, whose winners were awarded a few days ago by Telespazio’s CEO Luigi Pasquali, Marco Brancati, Head of Innovation and Technological Governance, and Maurizio Corselli, Head of Human Resources and Organisation.
Created in 2004 to enhance the wealth of knowledge and promote intellectual property within the Leonardo Group, this year the Telespazio Innovation Award has reached its sixteenth edition. The competing teams, made up of participants from all the countries in which Telespazio operates around the world and from the Group's various subsidiaries, competed in the two categories, Technology Results and Product Results.
Within the first category, Technological Results, the prize was awarded to the proposal "Mission integration projects for future Lunar Exploration Services", focused on the Lunar Communication and Navigation Services project developed within the Moonlight initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA).
The goal is to study a service infrastructure to enable the growing number of missions and commercial undertakings that will target the Moon in the next decades, minimizing the costs for all the future lunar missions. Several technologies are tackled in this study, related to different segments of the whole system, for both communication and navigation services: Earth Ground Segment, Lunar Space Segment, Moon Surface Segment and Lunar User Segment.
The team is lead by Giuseppe Tomasicchio and is composed by Carlo Albanese, Luca Andolfi, Davide Apponi, Massimo Capozzi, Dario Castagnolo, Alessandra Ceccarelli, Alessia De Matteis, Paolo Fortini, Koen Geurts, Fabrizio Paolillo, Filippo Rodriguez e Luca Spazzacampagna.
For the second category, Product Results, the award went to the project "St Lucia GIC: an early warning system to predict and manage the consequences of extreme weather events", with team leader Paolo Berardone and team members Mauro Di Donna, Domenico Grandoni, Carlo Morucci, Paola Darma Maria Nicolosi, Daniele Pellegrino, Dino Quattrociocchi and Vincenzo Scotti.
The Geo Information Centre (GIC) designed and developed for the Saint Lucia Government is a new, cutting-edge solution for increasing the alert capacity of local authorities in case of flood events, and for a rapid evaluation of damages after the event occurred.
The GIC is based on a powerful combination of different information sources both generic publicly available such as NOAA bulletins or other international networks and social media, and high precision systems such as local weather radar, rain-gauge stations and optical/radar satellites.
Now the projects will move on to the second phase of the competition, where they can compete for the Leonardo Innovation Award 2022.
From the numerous proposals received, three projects were selected for special mention. These are in particular T-DROMES, an end-to-end digital solution that allows to scale the use of drones in complex VLOS and BVLOS operations with a "Drone-as-a-Service" business model, led by Corrado Orsini, the IMPACT project (aI Methodology to imProve mApping produCTion), an advanced system that exploits the latest analysis techniques based on Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence to simplify and speed up the work of massive cartographic production, led by Giorgio Pasquali of e-GEOS and, finally, NAVTIMING - Resilient, Trustworthy, Ubiquitous Time Transfer, born with the objective of developing and demonstrating an innovative and effective hybrid solution (satellite and terrestrial) for the dissemination, transfer and synchronization of time, in order to economically provide timing services for future applications, led by Martin Bransby of Telespazio UK.