I started writing these reviews a year ago, really to get a feel of the pace of change in Earth Observation / Geospatial today. If you are interested in the major EO related events in 2017, please go to the link below:
Q1 2018
China launched two Superview-1 EO satellites into low Earth orbit in January.
Closely followed by 31 more satellites, including Earth-i’s full-color video sensor, ICEYE SAR CubeSat and Cartosat -2.
ESA’s first mission of the year, GomX-4B is launched – a CubeSat with a hyperspectral camera.
Sentinel 1 data is made available on AWS.
The next Landsat science team was selected.
Skywatch raised $3.2million in a funding round.
Digital Globe published an interesting blog post about machine learning – not about extracting data from satellite imagery, but reducing the cost of hosting imagery and predicting what images are going to be in demand.
Landsat 7 ETM+ completes its 100,000th orbit!
The scene from #Landsat7's 100,000th orbit was imaged at 13:59:40 GMT (Path 229 Row 56) & downlinked to the Australia (ASN) ground station at 14:38:43 GMT. The @USGS #EROSCenter expect archive ingest of this scene in the next few hours! pic.twitter.com/HDPEf3n5gg
— USGS Landsat Program (@USGSLandsat) February 1, 2018
Landsat 8 celebrates 5 years in orbit.
Planet announces surface reflectance basemaps.
Sentinel 3B is coming!
Sentinel-3B launch 🚀 planned 25 April. This will be the seventh Sentinel launch in 4 years. We currently produce 14 TB data volume per day ! Very few realise the magnitude and success of Copernicus. Compliments to all involved ! @CopernicusEU @ESA_EO
— Josef Aschbacher (@AschbacherJosef) February 17, 2018
QGIS 3 is here! And it has some amazing new tools:
Day 21 of #24daysofqgis : This is a big one… coming soon in #QGIS 3.0 – interactive, fully integrated 3D map views!! (Thanks to @lutraconsulting and the @qgis grant program) #qgisadvent pic.twitter.com/amm1CqLwHX
— North Road (@northroadgeo) December 21, 2017
2017 – a year of Weather by EUMETSAT:
A Wired article highlights how the US Government controls sensitive Satellite data.
How much does free data cost?
SSTL adds a fourth EO satellite to the TripleSat constellation.
ESA opens ΦLab!
Welcome to #ΦLab! New building, new challenges, a new chapter taking place at @esa #ESRIN pic.twitter.com/pWmAegl1Nj
— EO OPEN SCIENCE (@EO_OPEN_SCIENCE) December 15, 2017
Hummingbird technology, which uses drone and AI for agriculture, raises 3m in funding round.
EARSC and CRCSI sign MOU.
Remote Pixel launches an on demand NDVI viewer using AWS Lambda to process imagery on demand!
Space X will be launching WorldView Legion in 2021.
The way to remove space junk may well be with a harpoon.
Sentinel 2a and 2b are now both working with laser links to geostationary relay satellites, providing data much faster.
Do you want to know what a data refinery is?
India and Europe sign agreement to share satellite data.
Google Earth Engine updates:
Catch up with everything new on #EarthEngine, from storing tabular spatial data to improved machine learning: https://t.co/R9lY1NQEBU
— Google Earth (@googleearth) March 26, 2018
The UK getting a space port is one step closer.
LiDAR is used to uncover previously unseen Maya cities:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-42916261
And finally, some astonishing off angle shots from Planet:
https://medium.com/planet-stories/earths-wonders-like-you-ve-never-seen-them-before-ac9e2f39aa56/
Could 2018 be a revolutionary year for Small Sats? It may well be.
Did I miss something? Let me know and I will add it to the list.
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