This image from Airbus Defence and Space’s Pléiades Satellite was used in the follow up to the recent 6.2 magnitude Earthquake in central Italy that killed 298 people.
It’s been a very busy 2016 for Airbus Defence and Space. As an international satellite observation and analysis provider, Airbus is finding an increasing number of ways to provide better decision making for everything from earthquake recovery to small scale remote sensing by local councils.
Their boldest initiatives of recent times include the recent launch of streamlined imagery acquisition service One Tasking, announcing a commitment to design and build a new constellation of optical satellites for a launch between 2020 and 2021 and teaming up with Australia’s Neumann Space to launch an all new sensor on the International Space Station. Now, Airbus has also launched One Atlas, claimed to be the “world’s freshest satellite image library.”
One Atlas debuted on 29 September and is a data repository with Earth’s entire landmass collected and updated each year. The data covers all major cities have imagery from the 50-centimeter-resolution Pleiades twin satellites, and a global coverage of 1.5-meter-resolution SPOT imagery. All data found in One Atlas have been manually selected as the “best of the area,” with haze and clouds minimized.
Available online 24/7 and refreshed within a 12-month period, One Atlas provides customers with easy access to cost effective, high-quality and homogeneous imagery and is expected to benefit military operations planning, infrastructure preparatory studies and even tree cover change detection in regions prone to deforestation.
Artist’s view of the proposed Neumann Space/Airbus Defence and Space sensor platform for the ISS.
Seamlessly integrated into the customer’s system, One Atlas facilitates the sharing of data across teams or partner organisations, with no compromise on security or privacy. It also enables users to plan, map and locate their teams, assets or areas of interest, anywhere on the globe, allowing operators to devote more time to their core mission.
“With One Atlas, we propose a radical change to our clients for the way they access our data”, said Bernhard Brenner, Head of Intelligence Business Cluster at Airbus Defence and Space. “We take care of everything: updating, selecting, processing and hosting – all to make it easier, cheaper and faster for our customers”.
Airbus Defence and Space has also recently struck a deal with Australia’s Neumann Space to launch a new payload onto the International Space Station (ISS). As part of the new Bartolomeo Platform, the platform will provide an end-to-end service for fast, cost-efficient and reliable access to the ISS for private and institutional users on commercial terms.
The new platform is expected to attract customers from areas including Earth observation, technology demonstrators, astro- and heliophysics, material science and new space flight applications.
