ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING

The Space Revolution the Earth Needs 

By Javier Canales Luna

February 26, 2021

Luis Quintanilla

On 4 October 1957, a small aluminium sphere 58 centimeters in diameter with four radio antennas broke in the Earth’s orbit. It was Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite. Launched by the Soviet Union, Sputnik inaugurated the so-called “space race” with the United States, a competition between the two rivals during the Cold War to achieve space exploration milestones. 

In those days, the space was seen as a theater, a far and well-suited place for the two great powers of the moment to show technological power and, by extension, ideological superiority. Things have changed quite a lot since the end of the conflict, and the space ecosystem is no exception. Today’s society would be hardly possible without satellite technology. Cuts in launching cost and developments in satellite miniaturisation are revolutionising aerospace, opening the gate for new players in a market traditionally monopolised by large national space organizations from a restricted group of countries.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientist, more than 2.700 operational satellites, both public and commercial, are currently circling the planet (and the number is expected to rise dramatically in 2020s, in line with space activity growth predictions), providing a wide range of applications, including Internet connectivity, GPS and Earth Observation (EO).

EO data is proving increasingly helpful in environment matters. Data collected from satellite remote sensing provide valuable information to monitor and assess the status of natural and man-made systems. Satellite availability, coupled with recent advancements in spatial resolution and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, have resulted in new series of breakthroughs, leading climate researchers to speak of a golden age of EO. 

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it

Climate change is having serious impacts in the planet’s atmosphere and ecosystems. Accurate environmental data is key for scientists to understand, assess and predict the impact of the climate crisis and for policy-makers to advance effective strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. However, monitoring environmental changes is not an easy task. As stressed by María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, former President of the United Nations General Assembly, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. Great hurdles remain in traditional monitoring systems using sensors on the land, including the limited coverage (about 30% of the planet’s surface is covered, mostly land areas), the lack of measurement uniformity, and the risk of technical failure or human tampering. 

Here is where EO comes to the rescue. Satellites offer bird’s eye views that can reveal patterns and track changes that are hard to detect from the ground.  Over 450 satellites are currently in orbit for EO purposes. A tiny portion are heavy multisensor infrastructures operated by official space organizations like NASA or the European Space Agency (ESA), aiming to monitor specific aspects of Earth’s natural system. The rest belongs to large constellations of smaller, low-cost satellites, launched by private companies such as SpaceX and Planet Labs, which are contributing to the increasing imagery availability, coverage and granularity. 

Once the image data is available, the next question is what to do with it. The problem is that EO satellites output a huge amount of image data (only the ESA/EU Copernicus satellites produce tens of terabytes per day). Fortunately,  AI is helping automate a task otherwise impossible for humans to process alone. In short, machine learning algorithms can be used to classify imagery from large datasets, thereby facilitating the process of information discovery.

As a result of these advances, the environmental applications of EO data has not ceased to increase in the last decade. Satellites provide wider and continuous observation capability, as the same sensor can be used at different places in the world, including remote and inhospitable zones. This will make it easier to detect illegal environmental practices or track progress in areas such as agriculture, fisheries and forest policies.  The space revolution will also provide new ammunition to tackle climate change. Having a reliable and disaggregated account for global carbon emissions is key to assess progress in countries commitments under the Paris Agreement. Provided that satellites can provide unequivocal and uniform evidence across countries, EO methodologies could be adopted to validate emissions reported by companies and governments, enhancing transparency and accountability. This is the idea behind TRACE (“Tracking Real-time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions”), an international initiative working to track real-time global carbon emissions from major polluters using a mix of satellite image processing and machine learning. 

Towards a new paradigm in environmental monitoring?

Yet the important advances in recent years, there are still several challenges ahead for satellite remote sensing before it can be accepted as a reliable and well-understood measurement technique (Ruf et al, 2018). At the technical level, space-based environmental monitoring methodologies remain in an early stage, an further progress is need to calibrate the raw measuring devices, correctly interpret the the measurements(a task that is becoming very complex when using certain AI algorithms) and smoothly combine these measurements  with terrestrial sources (eg, meteorology stations or emission estimates from open datasets).

Plus, there is the question on how to make the space revolution beneficial from end-users and the public sector. Despite the hype provoked by Elon Musk’s plans to colonise Mars or Joe Bezos's Blue Origin announcement of incoming tourist trips into orbit , the space is still very far from regular people. There is the need to accelerate the development of the space downstream market. Improving user engagement is central in this process, as only by working with local problems users can judge whether a given space-based solution is fit for purpose, thus providing valuable feedback to improve the service. However, there are still significant barriers such as restricted data access (though there is a growing trend towards the democratisation of the use of satellite data) and users’ lack of EO relevant digital skills.

Limited awareness and understanding of what is going on above the sky not only compromise the rapid expansion of the space market, it also slows down the integration of EO applications within the public sector.  Evidence from satellite data could be used by decision-makers and legislative authorities to improve or reform current environmental policies and regulatory frameworks. EO-based applications would then become crucial to ensure compliance and standardise monitoring and verification processes.

Javier Canales holds a Dual Bachelor in Law and Political Science from Carlos III University and a LL.M. in European Law from Maastricht University. After completing his legal studies, he specialised in the field of data science. He currently works as a Data Analyst at Trecone Solutions and part-time instructor at Datahack, where he teaches course of Big Data and Python Programming.