Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #19
Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation
Level-2 News
Xplore announces first launch of remote-sensing smallsat [link]
“The company plans to launch its first Xcraft small satellite in the fourth quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare.”
Among its instruments there is a hyperspectral imager. Xplore said its hyperspectral imagery will be offered at 2-meter and 5-meter resolution.
Global Top 100 Geospatial Companies — 2023 Edition [link]
An annual list of the best geospatial companies in the world.
A list of some major Earth observation missions coming up this year [link]
TerraWatch Space compiled an non-exhaustive list of EO missions planned for launch later this year.
Satellite images of penguin poop lead scientists to ‘exciting discovery’ [link]
“After poring over images from the European Commission’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite mission and also the Maxar WorldView-3 satellite, scientists were recently able to confirm the existence of a new emperor penguin colony comprising around 500 birds.”
OSK Secures $10 Million to Commercialize Hyperspectral Intelligence [link]
“Orbital Sidekick (OSK) announced a $10 million investment round from strategic investors to commercialize its asset monitoring solution, which enables the energy sector to further enhance monitoring and mitigate pipeline emissions.
The funding will also support the deployment of OSK’s GHOSt Constellation, a fleet of satellites equipped with best-in-class hyperspectral sensors launching later this year.”
ACME, ASTERRA Collaborate for Lithium Discovery Using Satellite Technology [link]
“ASTERRA and ACME Lithium announced their teaming agreement and collaboration in which ASTERRA satellite-based technology was used in the discovery of the highest values of lithium to date in Fish Lake Valley, Nevada.”
ASTERRA use PolSAR data for mineral exploration.
Developer’s Orbit
Using computers to fix climate change; Open Climate Fix on Huggingface [link]
Open Climate Fix has been a strong proponent of open-source machine learning and open data. And they have made available both their models and tens of terabytes of weather and satellite data on Hugging Face!
Snapshots
Planet Snapshots Issue 60: Tip & Cue [link]
In this week’s issue: Tip & cue.
“Tip & cue is the process by which one high-frequency satellite constellation can detect (or tip) a change over large areas, then cue a higher-resolution satellite for a closer look.”
Biodiversity: Botanical Conservatory of Porquerolles [link]
“The microclimate of the small Provençal island of Porquerolles makes it possible to preserve and cultivate on 180 ha, a collection of 800 varieties of Mediterranean fruit trees.”
Interesting reads
Radar satellite images are too hard to use today [link]
In the end of the day, satellite images are just images and any software engineer or data scientist with a bit of background in computer vision can apply methods and tools they already know while handling optical images. SAR is different and there is a learning curve associated with it. And I haven’t even mentioned InSAR yet!
Follow this blog post by Maxime Lenormand on his interview with Iain H Woodhouse on why SAR is tricky to figure out.
EO-based detection of super-emitters [link]
Read this article to learn how organizations and companies detect methane emissions using remote sensing data.
Podcast
Terrawatch Space Podcast #58: The Future of Earth Observation with Jed Sundwall, Radiant Earth Foundation [link]
“In this episode, Jed Sundwall and Aravind discuss what the Radiant Earth Foundation does, his experience at AWS, the importance of building data products in EO, analysis-ready data and what that means, Jed’s thesis on the future of EO with the three things we need, the future of open source in EO and more.”
Call for papers
The Earth Vision workshop at CVPR2023 in Vancouver [link]
The deadline for paper submissions is on March 9th, 2023.
Upcoming competitions
CryoHackathon2023 [link]
“The overall aim of this event is for all participants to have fun across an exciting weekend, collaborating together on exciting projects linked to the cryosphere, in a nice, inclusive and respectful atmosphere! Anyone is more than welcome to participate, and no coding experience is required!”
Dates: 17th — 19th February 2023
Learning
The “Jump-Start SAR Data Analysis in the Cloud with ASF’s OpenSARLab” Earthdata webinar is now available online [link]