The contracts span important focus areas:
- Inform. On behalf of ESA Telespazio VEGA UK will lead a pan-European team to provide data quality assessments of EO mission data from national and commercial providers such as Planet, Earth-i and Spire. Providing information in the data itself, on characteristics such as the uncertainty of the measurements or traceability of how the observations were derived, is critical for end-users. It helps them to make informed decisions on whether a data-set is fit-for-purpose for a particular application or decision-making process. See here for more info.
- Connect. Also on behalf of ESA our team will define, based on accepted principles and standards, open interfaces to allow connection of the burgeoning number of Earth observation data platforms. Hosted big data platforms allow powerful analysis and use of large quantities of data to provide information and knowledge for decision-making. Entitled the “Common Architecture”, the programme will allow linkage of the different data platforms so that a user can efficiently access and consume a wealth of European data and tools to fulfil their needs. See here for more info.
- Exploit. As part of the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), our pan-European team will implement and maintain a framework to evaluate a series of climate services across 10 sectors: Energy, Water, Agriculture & Forestry, Health, Transport, Coastal, Tourism, Insurance, Infrastructure, and Disaster Risk. The framework will provide a mechanism to accept climate services and workflows into the Climate Data Store, https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu a valuable resource enabling users across the public and private sector to manage the impact of climate change on business and society. See here for more info.
Graham Turnock, CEO of the UK Space Agency, said: “This is an excellent example of where the UK is taking leadership on the European stage, including through our membership of the European Space Agency, in the exploitation and use of high quality Earth Observation and Climate services. This should enable significant impact and growth in the form of applications and services to the wider user community, and we congratulate Telespazio VEGA UK on these important success stories.”
Marco Folino, CEO of Telespazio VEGA UK said: “We are excited to have the opportunity to make such important contributions to key parts of the Earth Observation & Climate data value chain. Ease of access to high quality and informative satellite-derived data sources is critical to the growth of downstream services, and we are proud to lead these European initiatives on behalf of the UK.”