Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #23
Spectral Reflectance Newsletter #23
Weekly newsletter on Earth Observation
Level-2 News
Egypt Launches Earth Observation Satellite, Horus-1 [link]
The Egyptian Space Agency (EgSA) CEO, Prof Sherif Sedky, announced that Egypt had added another Earth observation (EO) satellite to its fleet after successfully launching the Horus-1 satellite into the sun-synchronous polar orbit.
Horus-1 satellite carries a high-resolution imaging camera, for enhancing sustainable development and resource management and monitoring water sources.
Pixxel Unveils the First-Ever Set of Hyperspectral Images [link]
“Pixxel, India’s space data startup unveiled the first-ever set of images from its hyperspectral pathfinder satellites as part of its ‘First Light’ Campaign. The images released capture intricate details of the land and water features of regions such as Krishna River Delta (India), Palm Islands (Dubai), Super pit (Australia), Saloum River Delta (Senegal), Granny Smith Gold mine (Australia) and Brockman (Australia).”
Maxar Launches High-Performance SYNTH3D Digital Twin [link]
“Maxar Technologies, provider of comprehensive space solutions and secure, precise, geospatial intelligence, announced the availability of SYNTH3D, a high-performance, geotypical 3D representation of the entire planet for gaming, simulation, entertainment, virtual reality (VR), smart cities and metaverse.”
All SYNTH3D is rendered with Unreal Engine.
Check out this video by Blackshard.ai.
Army Awards Maxar Contract to Continue Support One World Terrain Effort [link]
“Maxar Technologies on Monday said it has been awarded a new contract under the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain (OWT) effort to continue to evolve and add geospatial data for virtual models of the Earth.”
Developer’s Orbit
An interactive web app for visualizing Maxar Open Data [link]
Check out this interactive Streamlit web app created by Qiusheng Wu using leafmap and streamlit. The app is hosted on Hugging Face and Streamlit Cloud. Code is available on GitHub.
How to despeckle a SAR image based on Total Variation? [link]
Jian Kang walks us through despecling a SAR image using Total Variation regularization.
The tutorial includes a lot of equations and an implementation in Python.
Snapshots
Planet Snapshots Issue 64: Wetlands [link]
In this week’s issue:
The beauty and value of wetlands
The remains of a Saharan lake
A 61-mile line in the sand
Huge icebergs from the Doomsday Glacier
Interesting reads
Antarctic Peninsula glaciers on the run [link]
“Glaciers located along the coast of Antarctica are flowing faster during the summer due to a combination of melting snow and warmer ocean temperatures.
A team of researchers, led by scientists at the University of Leeds, has used more than 10,000 Sentinel-1 images, taken above the Antarctic Peninsula between 2014 and 2021, to understand how the flow of glaciers into the waters around the Antarctic alters during colder and warmer periods.”
Related:
10,000 Satellite Images Reveal Speed-Up of Glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula [link]
How Satellite-Derived Bathymetry Enables Coastal Monitoring and Protection [link]
As nearly 50% of the world’s coastal waters remain unsurveyed, mainly due to high costs, lead-time, and health and safety issues involved in collecting this data using the more traditional data collection methods, satellite-derived bathymetry has gained interest.
Follow this post to learn more about satellite-derived bathymetry and its applications.
Saving a Forest of One [link]
Read this story on NASA’s Earth Observatory about Pando; a massing root system that connects more than 40,000 genetically identical trees.
Pando means “I spread” in Latin, it’s estimated to be 14,000 years old and is thought to be the largest living organism on earth.
Measuring water from space [link]
Follow this article (and its sources at the bottom) to learn more about satellite gravimetry is used to make groundwater and surface water measurements.
Future focus: Towards better flood and drought monitoring [link]
In this post Dr. Wolfgang Wagner explains how remote sensing observations of the water cycly is improving our understanding of floods, droughts and the challenges posed by climate change.
Learning
An introduction to orthorectification [link]
UP42 has created this introduction to orthorectification.
They explain what orthorectification is, what are the benefits of orthorectifying images, how it is applied and example use cases.
Follow the link to learn more!
The University of Alaska Fairbanks 3-course Certificate Program “Synthetic Aperture Radar: Applications” just launched on edX [link]
As SAR-related skills are trending right now, check out this course-series.
Related:
GEOS 657 Microwave Remote Sensing [link]