Earth observation

Summer is upon us, and as our gaze shifts towards the stars during those warm, clear nights, SpaceWatch.Global brings you its second collection or the Summer Listening Series. Based on the vote by our newsroom, we have mapped out an interstellar journey across five categories. This week we are starting with “Climate, Space and Earth.”

Spire Global announced on the 8th of August that it has been awarded a Space Services contract by GHGSat, a global monitor of greenhouse gases from space. Under the agreement, Spire Global will build, launch, and operate four additional 16U satellites that will carry GHGSat payloads to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. This has been built upon Spire’s initial agreement for three 16U satellites that will launch by the end of 2023. The addition of these satellites will enhance GHGSat’s global emissions monitoring and measurement capacity

ICEYE US Inc has received its first Task Order under a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) with NASA, enabling NASA to acquire ICEYE’s synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) data for evaluation by scientific and academic communities. This will help to determine suitability for advancing NASA’s Earth Science research objectives. The BPA gets its funding from the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate. Since 2020, NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program has been identifying, evaluating, and acquiring data from commercial sources that align with NASA’s Earth Science Division objectives.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has, through its Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) office has announced the modification of operating licenses of multiple commercial satellite systems. These license conditions had previously restricted the operations of commercial satellites, preventing them from offering their full remote sensing capabilities to the public. On July 20, 2020, NOAA implemented new, specific regulations on private remote sensing systems.

Umbra, a space radar technology company, has announced that it has successfully produced a 16-cm resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image. According to the Company, it is the highest-resolution commercial satellite image ever released. The company also announced that it’s now able to provide customers with the highest-quality data its satellites are capable of capturing — in all formats and resolutions, including complex data better than 25 cm, for the first time.

As a response to wildfires which have spread across Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Tunisia, and Canada an updated version of ESA’s World Fire Atlas is now available. It provides a detailed analysis of wildfires across the globe. The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) has reported that, as of 29 Jul 2023, more than 234,516 hectares of land across the European Union has been burned this year.

Hisdesat, the Spanish Government satellite operator, has announced that the first satellite in the SPAINSAT NG program, SpainSat NG-I, will be ready for launch in the summer of 2024 after confirming that the program is making good progress. Space X will be responsible for launching the Spanish satellite into orbit with a Falcon 9 launcher from its base at Cape Canaveral or from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Aeolus, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s wind mission, reentered Earth’s atmosphere on 28 July at around 21:00 CEST above Antarctica, with the US Space Command confirming the reentry. The reentry came after a series of complex maneuvers that lowered Aeolus’ orbit from an altitude of 320 km to just 120 km to reenter the atmosphere and burn up. Crucially, these maneuvers, the first assisted reentry of its kind, positioned Aeolus so that any pieces that may have failed to burn up in the atmosphere would fall within the satellite’s planned Atlantic ground tracks.

The European Space Agency's Galileo Project has launched its new Telemetry, Tracking, and Control (TT&C) facility, featuring a 13.5-meter diameter parabola dish on top of a 10-meter-high building structure of steel and concrete. Known as the acronym TTCF-7, the facility is within the premises of Europe’s launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, beside its older sibling TTCF-2.

Pixxel has won a multi-crore grant from iDEX (Innovations for Defence Excellence under the Ministry of Defence) for the Mission DefSpace Challenge under iDEX Prime (Space) to manufacture miniaturized multi-payload satellites for the Indian Air Force. Oixxel received this grant as part of the SPARK grants by iDEX. As a result, this grant will equip Pixxel to develop small satellites of up to 150 kgs for Electro-Optical, Infrared, Synthetic Aperture Radar, and Hyper Spectral purposes.