Hello, and welcome to this Earth Imaging-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Bentley Systems.
Today’s Top Story is the European Space Agency, which has been crushing it lately. In a previous broadcast, I mentioned the successful launch of its Sentinel-1B environmental-monitoring satellite. More recently, the agency spearheaded the launch on May 24th of the 13th and 14th Galileo satellites, the European Union’s satellite navigation constellation.
Then ESA released data successfully transmitted from a Sentinel satellite to Earth via its European Data Relay System (EDRS), also known as the SpaceDataHighway. This geostationary relay satellite links to sensing satellites tens of thousands of kilometers away and can send the data back home at speeds up to 1.8 Gigabits per second. Learn more about how this system works at the Earth Imaging Journal Web site, where you can find this interview with Jorg Herrmann, the head of business development for EDRS.
Most everything in life runs in hot and cold streaks, and ESA right now is “on fire.” They get a “tip of the cap” from all of us at V1 Media.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this interview clip of Greg Bentley, the CEO of Bentley Systems, at the recent SPAR 3D Expo and Conference.
ESA and NASA seem to have a friendly competition, and although ESA has been hogging the news of late, I’d like to share an interesting video clip about NASA’s ongoing North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study (NAAMES) mission.
In industry headlines, the Merrick-Surdex Joint Venture signed a five-year, multimillion-dollar Geospatial Product and Services Contract with the U.S. Geological Survey to provide mapping and surveying services.
TerraGo named Positioning Solutions International an authorized reseller of TerraGo Edge software, which also is now available with all ruggedized Android tablets from DT Research.
Earth-i signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Telespazio VEGA to provide new and existing customers with SAR data from the COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation.
Teledyne Optech signed a North American distribution agreement with GeoShack.
And Siteco Informatica launched its new high-performance Sky-Scanner LiDAR and image data-collection system for UAVs.
And now for today’s Final Thought. I was working on a story about a new satellite platform called Ceres being developed by asteroid-mining company Planetary Resources. Excuse me? Did I just say asteroid-mining company? Yes. Yes, I did. Apparently I missed the memo that there’s a company out there, maybe more than one, looking at ways to mine near-Earth asteroids for water, space fuel and precious minerals. And after watching a few of their videos, it didn’t seem as crazy as it first appeared. It must be difficult to think about projects with timelines that could take decades, but they do have some high-profile investors, and if you can live long enough to see it, asteroid mining could be a real thing. Cool.
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:
geospatialstream.com/subscribe
I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
