Ibadan, 1 May 2024. – Kuva Space has won a €1.8 million contract to participate in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Civil Security from Space (CSS) program. The Company will, therefore, provide advanced hyperspectral situational awareness information for monitoring and mitigating civil security and crisis events.
As a result, within the three-year R&D program, Kuva Space will test and develop onboard hyperspectral data processing, Sat-to-Sat, and Sat-to-IoT mobile communication and subsequently demonstrate it with a field study together with the Finnish authorities. The program aims to enhance border surveillance by detecting and rediscovering illegal activities along the Baltic Sea area between Finland, Estonia, and Sweden.
Currently, the civil security domain faces various challenges related to scarce resources, data access, big data handling, and data transmission due to the growth of data volume, distribution velocity, data variety, and security. Especially before, during, and after emergencies, experts rely on disparate data sources and satellite assets to anticipate events, assess the situation, and communicate, meaning that actionable information in near real-time is paramount.
In response, five nations (Austria, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, and Switzerland) under ESA have contributed funding to create SMART-CONNECT, a consortium of various technology actors led by Austrian company Geoville. Under SMART-CONNECT, Kuva Space, Epic Blue, INOV, Klepsydra, neXat, Sistema and VITO, aim to revolutionize crisis communication for swift data exchange and timely provision of actionable information in emergency situations.
Speaking on the award, Jarkko Antila, CEO of Kuva Space, commented, “Bringing information on any emergency events to first responders as fast as we can has a huge environmental, humanitarian, and security impact. We look forward to collaboratively developing a robust solution to test the end-to-end delivery of insights to the user as part of the CSS program.”
