After the recent attacks over Saudi Arabian oil rigs, a set of motion was triggered at the URSA space, a satellite data and analytics firm that is based in Ithaca, New York.
During the Satellite Innovation Conference 2019, Derek Edinger, who is the co-founder and the chief of strategy at Ursa Space said that the whole process was manual, everyone was communicating over calls, emails etc. he described the scenario as a mission control room.
Companies that are responsible for supplying the earth’s observation data have often expressed their desire to speed the whole process so that they can provide information to their clients at a much faster rate once they have it. According to the statement of an expert panel, an important component amidst all this is rapid tasking for satellite data if the demands of clients are due to a sensitive issue.
Nina Soleng, who is the marketing director of the Norwegian satellite ground station firm called the Kongsberg Satellite Services and said that they have been trying to reduce the whole time taken for this procedure and she believes that there is still a lot of room left for improvement of the time of acquisition of the data in demand.
According to the expert panel the process of transfer and analytics of the data is mostly manual currently.However, larger firms and Earth observation start-ups are working hard to automate the whole process as early as they can. In a few cases if the client places the order for imagery within a day or two after tasking, it is considered as an emergency order.
Soleng says that there is a promising characteristic in Earth Subscriptions modules, for example the module offered by the Planet which is a San Francisco based firm with control over more than a 100 earth observation satellites which captures images of earth’s landmass on a daily basis. KSAT has shown interest in acquiring images of the oceans so that they can help their clients for different maritime usages.
