Kepleria2.0

Szczecin, Poland | Measuring the Value of Earth Observations

Awards & Nominations

Kepleria2.0 has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

AFDATA. Strategy for more available fast and safe satellite data for all Africa

High-Level Project Summary

We are taking Copernicus satellites as a case study to identify how they are quantifying the value that Earth observation (EO) data bring to the African economy and society. We identified the challenge to include non-tangible outcomes, such as people's security and life quality, and the way to advocate for the use of EO data to tackle the UN 2030 Global Agenda and Africa 2063 Goals. Our solution is to propose a full procedure to support the African decision-makers and citizens to improve their life quality, starting by mapping the ground stations, extracting the data, processing it with proper algorithms and presenting it using a specific platform.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sdd-0wDBzhlvPh8BzV5vQtstoW9ZUt4i/view?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://www.canva.com/design/DAErswjMgdY/nbVi43vENQGU66-BAXLJjQ/view?utm_content=DAErswjMgdY&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton

Detailed Project Description

Use of Satellite data for socio-economic development in Africa

Index

Problem
Introduction to why Copernicus
A Case Study for Bedtime Story
The Africa Challenge
Benefits for the Continent
Our Solution
Future Steps

Problem

The need for space applications products and services is becoming more and more urgent in the African region, and the development of a proper African strategy for the use of outer-space technologies is a major priority. It is also more urgent because of the poor quality of the internet network, which doesn't allow the proceeding of useful data in a proper way. Several African countries have not yet created their national space programs, nor formed their agencies.

Consequently, Africans tried to solve these issues by being allied to several international space agencies and private companies to support their projects like NASA, ESA and other agencies that were providing useful data.

The poor data processing in the region did not allow them to use these data in a convenient way.

That's way, it is important to provide a full problem-solving procedure starting from the satellite, going to the ground stations, processing module and user interface.

Introduction to why Copernicus

In 2001, Europe achieved a new set of eyes to guard them and help them achieve a more sustainable and secure future for the world. This new advanced scientific program was named after the Polish scientist and observer, who greatly contributed to modern science with his theory of the heliocentric universe: Copernicus.

To achieve this, satellites were constructed and launched to space, creating the Sentinel constellation. Through this program, the aim was to achieve a global, continuous, autonomous, high quality, wide range of Earth observation data. “Providing accurate, timely and easily accessible information to, among other things, improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change, and ensure civil security”. To reach this goal, they are providing open-access data (free of charge), to provide autonomous and independent access to information on a global level in order to help service providers, public authorities and other international organizations improve the quality of life for the citizens. By providing open-access data, Copernicus allowed and encouraged the development of downstream services to be created, boosting the creation of new business and technology advancement.

Copernicus program has two components:

Space component: observation satellites and associated ground segment with missions observing land, atmospheric and oceanographic parameters.

In-situ measurements: ground-based and airborne data-gathering networks providing information on oceans, continental surface and atmosphere.

But how much does it cost to build and keep on operating such a high achieving program? The below infographic shows us the cost, including maintenance, for Copernicus operations, as well as who’s benefiting from this and the value that brings to societies, especially by providing jobs, opportunities to create new startups, the technological and scientific advancement, which all benefits the community and the planet we live in.

The above economical and societal benefits look great. Yet, many people still don’t understand why satellite data is better than technologies used on Earth, such as soil sensors, but one of the most important challenges is they don’t know how to extract the data, how to elaborate them and how to interpret them. Because not everyone will become an Earth observation expert, most people want to use the data to implement it fastly into their business, research or community projects. They need readable, already processed data because you can achieve infinite possibilities with Earth observation satellite data. The image below shows a few of the benefits from Earth observation data.

As you can see from the picture above, the problems we can tackle are many.

Thanks to satellite observation data, we can take action to achieve the UN 2030 Sustainable Goals just by looking at those amazing pictures, taken from satellites, as shown in the following picture (taken from the 2018 United Nation Office for Outer Space Affair report: “European Global Navigation Satellite System and Copernicus: Supporting the Sustainable Development Goals BUILDING BLOCKS TOWARDS THE 2030 AGENDA”)

To fully understand the possible impact, let me tell you a story.

A Case Study for Bedtime Story

The Dragon and the Eye in the Sky

If you go to Slovenia, you won’t be able to see her, but she will see you. In the midst of Slovenia's beautiful and tall mountains, a dragon lives. A dragon day is different from what mythology books have told us. It’s the 21st century, and even they evolved. Now they co-live with the wildlife and they protect it from the dangers that humans and natural hazards can cause. But if the dragon is providing safety for the animals, no one is doing it for humans in a prompt way. This is the case of the flooding of the Krka river that happened in 2017.

It has been raining for quite a while and the dragon decided to go for a stroll. She needed to scratch her wings, but also to make sure that the animals were safe and enjoying the rain as much as she wanted. Not many humans are out when it rains, and most animals take this time to run free and the dragon to fly at high speed, mixing the rain and the wind on her face, feeling free. It was on this occasion that she saw the river Krka was about to explode. She rushes to inform the animals living next to it to find refuge somewhere else for the next few days. From looking down from up where she was, she was able to see the imminent danger and inform the rest of the animals on time.

Humans didn’t have the same luck. Of this, you can hear from Anton who lost her dog friend that wasn’t able to escape from the house that was hit by the river flooded water, and the trees that carried with it.

The boy lost his best friend and passed his days in the woods, trying to understand why. It was one rainy day that he first saw the dragon, the dragon that changed his life and the ones of humans. When Anton first saw the dragon, he was scared and couldn’t move an inch of his muscles. But what came next, he couldn’t have expected. He saw the dragon taking off and flying high in the sky. She was going up and down the sky and talking with animals while coming back down, or at least he thought to see because he couldn’t understand any sound made by the dragon or animal. But an idea came to his mind. If the dragon can fly so high she can see the forest, she can Slovenia, she can see the world!

He ran back to his parents and asked if we had eyes to watch us from the sky. The parents responded: satellites. So Anton said: “So why didn’t satellites warn us that the flood was coming?”. The parents were in disbelief and responded: “Well, they are not that fast and actually, we don’t even know how they could give us that information…. Sorry, but it’s just not possible”. Anton was in disbelief.

The next day his parents went to work, both working in the same insurance company. At lunchtime, they started to talk about how complicated it is to reimburse all the people affected by the flood. There were a lot of things to check before making those payments and those people were getting angrier and impatient each day. It is at this point that Anton’s mother brought up the subject of satellites and how easy it would have been to do their job by identifying the exact affected area. People started to talk, to research and they found a company named Flycom Technologies who specialises in remote sensing based preventative and predictive infrastructure maintenance services.

The two companies started to work together and the image below (taken from https://earsc.org/sebs/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SeBS_-insurance-Slovenia_sbroch_210310.pdf) shows the main beneficiaries along the value chain, including the corresponding services and benefits provided.

Two months later, when the family was having dinner, the parents started a conversation with a smirk on their faces. “Anton, do you know what happened today?”. “We ate”. “Well, of course, but we did something amazing at work. Thank you. We now have eyes that keep us safe by watching us from above”. The boy looked amazed and scared. He thought the grown-up had found and killed the dragon, but then something else came to mind and his eyes shined like stars. “The satellites?”. The parents nodded with joy. “Now we can understand the extent of a natural disaster to help the people who have insurance with us, which allows us to give them faster money, and we found out that we can help in looking after the environment with those data as well. We can detect areas in danger of flooding or landslides. We can map the area and see how it changed over time. Meaning that those data can also be used to protect and help our forests!” Anton stayed for almost 1 hour with his mouth because he couldn’t believe the infinite use that satellites could have, and it seems that his father couldn’t stop talking about the multiple and amazing advantages that satellites could bring to society, the economy and the whole world.

To let you visualise those impacts, here is a figure (from https://earsc.org/sebs/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SeBS_-insurance-Slovenia_sbroch_210310.pdf) to help you do that. The figure also shows the benefits from each tired that was illustrated in the above figure.

After telling you this story, I hope you are more convinced of the benefits that Earth observation data can bring for the economy, the society and to tackle the UN 2030 Agenda goals. Anyway, something is still missing. Still, not that many people are using satellite data, or know that they could use it. Why? Because getting the data from the satellite, elaborate and then interpret them can be time-consuming. Most people just want to know what actions will need to be taken based on the information collected by the satellites. More awareness in and about this possibility needs to happen, as well as developing businesses that can translate the Earth observation data into actions. This is also why it is difficult to bring this technology to Third World countries, even if they are the ones that could benefit the most from this technology.

Africa Challenge

Africa is one of the biggest continents in the world, with an abundance of resources that are still not yet exploited. Africa's potential is massive, yet we need to understand how to achieve it.

Africa has a serious issue related to food and water management. The level of drought and hunger is the highest in the world, and several countries are still struggling with this. The lowest rate of health care also contributes to the well-being of people, making it difficult to also manage illnesses. Those, unfortunately, are just a few of the problems that African countries face. That is why Africa 2063 was established, to contribute to the development of the continent. Within the Africa 2063 plan, they plan to exploit the power of Earth observation to achieve these goals. The European community is supporting Africa by providing them with Copernicus data and through capacity building programs allowing them to gather, elaborate and interpret satellite data locally. Not much improvement has been done so far, not many African governments, industries and both public and private sectors are leveraging satellite information.

There are many reasons behind this issue, mentioning the geopolitical conflicts, the socio-economic, the absence of governance in the space sector, the non-existent national space programs and the impact of climate change.

We propose an African based solution that could help to tackle both the UN 2030 agenda and Africa 2063 agenda Goals.

Benefits for the Continent

These space services cover several African needs responding to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the agenda 2063 that would solve multiple issues. For example, the high-speed train network connecting all African capitals and commercial centres, water management and mapping of rural areas, the formulation of a strategy for transforming the African economy from a supplier of raw materials to one that actively uses its own resources and the basic need of a high-speed internet connection that will be used daily for education, finance, health care, security etc. We need to consider a clear strategy to establish a chain linking the raw data coming from earth observation. Satellites to the end-user: government, citizens or company operating in the region.

Our Solution

Our idea is to develop the whole chain of the data downlinking until it reaches the end-user in a fast, strategic and secure way and creating an interactive platform for a better adaptation with the different end-users.

For the extraction of data from NASA satellites or any other one, we need a Machine Learning module to be inserted in the ground station or in the satellite itself that will be making the first stage of processing and compressing the exact data needed by the customer. Then data will be sent in a secured way. Here several crypto methods can be applied and will be explained in this paper.

The next step will be to create a map of Ground Stations distributed in a way to find an optimal assignment to all the satellites and cover the entire region.

The main goals for this mapping of ground stations are as follows:

The first goal is to minimize the number of unsatisfied requests from satellites, considering the exponential number of satellites growing in the coming decade, as many downlink operations as possible should be included in the final communication. Considering that the communication time of a satellite is a valuable resource that we need to utilize as efficiently as possible.
The second objective deals with the distribution of redundant requests. The new network of ground stations will make sure that all downlink operations in all different areas are assigned to each ground station in Africa and treated once in a secure way.
The third objective is that the customer will have the exact requested data without the background data.

This method will improve the efficiency of data communication between satellites and ground stations and the quality of communication in a reasonable time and react to sudden changes.

These 3 objectives will create solutions in a short time frame within any given scenario and assure that all data are correctly sent.

The next part is related to the Machine Learning algorithm to transform the raw data into usable data for each end-user. In this case, we will be using multilateral processing to cover the multiple uses.

The advantage of our idea is to produce the final data in smaller packs. That will allow us to use the slow internet connection to transfer more useful data, taking into consideration that the internet connection in the African region has the lowest speed in the world.

Then we will be having 3 main algorithms processing the data based on the request of the end-user.

The first algorithm would be mapping and tracing the villages, roads and buildings in the whole continent, covering exclusively all the rural areas and securing the path for the citizens. The algorithm will provide a better satellite imagery service compared to the existing ones and will give accurate data with high resolution with advanced processing to provide clear and reliable base maps and data layers.

The second algorithm will be tracing the hydrogeological and water resources maps, early warning and management of drought and flood as well as crop monitoring and food security using real-time streamflow and groundwater data, real-time precipitation, evapotranspiration, precipitation forecasts, soil moisture, streamflow, real-time vegetation characteristics, crop water needs and precipitation forecasts.

The third algorithm will provide accurate information of the forest map in Africa during a specific period defined by the user to prevent deforestation or analyse the zone affected by this disaster. It will provide data related to the CO2 level and temperature in a second step using the proper satellite data. In the end, the user will have a clear understanding of the impact of climate change in the region.

The application interface or the communication interface with the end-user will be the last phase of our procedure that will reply to the end-user requests by analysing the inputs and presenting the results in a fast and secure way. It will guide the users' step by step and make sure to get all the inputs and feedback in a secure way. It will take the end-user parameters like the data set from the needed satellite, exact start day and end day for the coverage, the cloud cover range, the quality needed, radius, longitude and latitude, linking it with the results provided after the processing in a few minutes.

In the end, the user will get the needed information shortly and efficiently. The decision-makers will be able to have a better overview of the current situation allowing them to start taking the proper settlement.

Future Steps:

We are still far from covering all the issues. We still have several ones that we need to consider.

Our service will be agile and will keep adapting the process by adding algorithms to provide more real-time solutions based on the feedback of the end-users and on the UN-SDG goals.

On another level, the number of ground Stations will increase according to the requests, in order to allow a faster and more stable connection with a better quality of downlinked data.

Then the Machine Learning module will be transferred to the satellites to make the data packets smaller and easier to send.

Space Agency Data

We used a data collected by NASA during years of use of Landsat satellite constellation. Data with interested us was a coverage of Africa by Landsat satellite Earth Observation data and numbers of scene collected by them during all his mission time. That inspired us to find a solution of a problem with transfer and understand a EO data to and by end users in Africa. Moreover, we used USGS data base to predict possible place to locate proposed by us ground stations in an efficient way for or solution. For the same reason we used NASA Landsat spacecraft orbit information.

https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat-8

https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/nli/landsat/landsat-global-archive-consolidation?qt-science_support_page_related_con=3#qt-science_support_page_related_con

Hackathon Journey

We, Kepleria team, are an analog astronauts on simulated lunar mission. We are closed in an analog astronaut habitat form 10 days. When we heard about the NASA Space App Challenge we decided to stop few of our experiments to take part in it. We spent a wonderful time cracking our Hackathon challenge in this specific multi-cultural environment . We learned a lot during the NASA Space App Challenge. Our team did research on various Earth Observation satellites as well as complex problems that emerging African countries have trouble with. We were inspired by the Copernicus project and wanted to improve the strategy of distributing data with slow internet connection in Africa because it improves life quality on the whole African continent. We want to create something special with a huge impact on society. We are a team full of creative and open minded young people, when we had some disputes we always solved it by using logic and reason. We would like to thank our mission command center which is PhD Agata Kołodziejczyk and M. Sc. Eng Mateusz Harasymczuk for putting us on this extraordinary mission. This mission is onece in a lifetime experience and opportunity