Hello, and welcome to this Earth Imaging-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
Today’s Top Story is Sentinel-3A, the European Space Agency satellite that was successfully launched on February 16th, 2016, from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia.
If you regularly watch this program, you know I’m a sucker for rocket launches, so it’s not surprising that I’m running this latest nighttime launch in the background.
After an 80-minute flight, Sentinel-3A was placed into its planned orbit, 817.5 kilometers above Earth. The satellite carries a suite of instruments that will measure Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere, providing information in near-real time for ocean and weather forecasting as part of Europe’s Copernicus program. The measurements also will be used to monitor changes in Earth’s climate and for more hands-on applications such as marine pollution and biological productivity.
Sentinel-3A is expected to be fully calibrated and operational in five months, and Sentinel-3B, its twin satellite, is scheduled for launch in 2017.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this Trimble interview clip.
V1 Media talks and writes a lot about smallsats, nanosats and cubesats, especially at our sister publications, Earth Imaging Journal and Sensors & Systems, but here are some highlights from an interesting video on the subject found on the ESA Web site.
And in UAS news, NASA began flying its Global Hawk over the Pacific Ocean to test if the aircraft could be used to augment satellites to collect data on developing storm systems.
In Industry Headlines, Esri released Drone2Map for ArcGIS, which turns raw still imagery from drones into professional 2D and 3D imagery products for land analysis, infrastructure inspection, and monitoring events such as natural disasters and environmental changes.
SimActive announced that Loxley purchased its Correlator3D for a major mapping project in Thailand.
Teledyne Optech released its Optech Lynx SG-S mobile survey system, which collects survey-grade 3D data from a lightweight and compact platform.
And Riegl introduced two new high-speed mobile-mapping systems, the VMQ-1HA single-scanner and MX-1HA dual-scanner systems.
For today’s Final Thought, here’s a clip from the University of Kentucky’s New Maps Plus online education showing that mapping and geospatial technology can indeed be fun. Even funny.
That’s it for this broadcast, but if you’d like to receive alerts when new GeoSpatial Stream videos are released, or sign up for additional V1 Media newsletters, please visit this Web site and register:
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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
