Your Global Geospatial Briefing for July 3rd: EU space program; Continental Mapping Consultants; trajectoryXyzt; CIGAR; Pakistan’s SAR satellite; Airbus/Planet partnership

The European Commission to spend $18.6B on space program

The Galileo and European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) satellite navigation systems and the Copernicus Earth-observation program will receive funds in an attempt to “up the game” of the EU’s space activities. Security concerns and a need to meet new infrastructure challenges among EU policy makers are likely motivations behind the heightened investment, but the United Kingdom’s involvement in the project following Brexit is in question, given that the U.K. is effectively a third party despite having played a key part in the designing and management of Galileo up to this point.

Continental Mapping Consultants collect $570M in contracts

Continental Mapping Consultants have received two 10-year prime contracts with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for geospatial data collection and production. Continental Mapping has performed global High Resolution Terrain, global aeronautical mapping, and the production of software tools for vertical obstruction identification and aeronautical product creation. The partnership with the NGA will allow Continental Mapping to expand their innovation centers in Madison, WI, St. Louis, MO, and Gainsville, VA.

Brand new commercial geospatial event coming to Washington

In response to the rapid of onset of GIS technologies in commercial venues, the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) has created the trajectoryXyzt event, the first conference to focus on the commercial applications of geospatial intel. Automated vehicles, precision agriculture, geo-targeted marketing and many other commercial industries will be on display in September, showing the endless possibilities for capitalizing on geospatial technology. Speakers will include Dr. Sarah Battersby of Tableau Software, Bo Ewald of D-Wave International, Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital, Auren Hoffman of SafeGraph, and Dr. Walter Scott, founder of DigitalGlobe and CTO at Maxar, among many others.

CIGAR will use DigitalGlobe’s Big Data Platform for Agriculture

Agricultural questions across the globe can soon be solved with machine learning. CIGAR’s Platform for Big Data in Agriculture will make data available for addressing challenges including food security and climate prosperity by mining DigitalGlobe’s 100 petabyte imagery library to create sophisticated datasets on agriculture, crop health and the environmental impacts of farming. The DigitalGlobe Geospatial Big Data platform (GBDX) will fuel CIGAR’s research and development efforts to generate agricultural information products.

Pakistan to Launch SAR satellite

Pakistan’s Foreign Office has announced that the Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellites (PRSS-01) will launch in July 2018. The PRSS-01 will consist of one satellite equipped with an electro-optical system and another with a synthetic aperture radar suite. The satellites are expected to contribute to the country’s socio-economic and infrastructure development while strengthening its border surveillance and security. According to Dr. Javed Iqbal—until recently the Head of the University of Karachi’s Institute of Space and Planetary Astrophysics–NASA provides imagery of Pakistan only “once every few hours… If we have our own satellites, we can program them to meet our own strategic needs, as well as help our domestic industry with 24-hour coverage.”

Airbus teams up with Planet to make new products

Aiming to create a new suite of global satellite data at several temporal and spatial resolutions, Airbus is partnering with Planet to facilitate both companys’ data and explore new market opportunities. According to CEO and co-founder of Planet Will Marshall, “Airbus brings long-standing success in serving reliable, high resolution remote sensing, and Planet brings its unique global coverage and temporal cadence, as well as agile aerospace iteration to get sensors quickly to space.” Together they will offer imagery of Earth every day at 3m resolution with PlanetScope satellites, and the capability to order images 1.5m (SPOT 6/7), 5m (Rapideye) and 22m (DMC Constellation).