Leicester University to help businesses develop applications for satellite data

Development opportunity

Space researchers and business development experts at Leicester University have set up the Space Technology Exchange Partnership to help business and public sector organisations to apply Earth Observation information technology.

The partnership was launched last week by the head of the European Union’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative Valere Moutarlier, Steven Briggs, Head of Earth Observation, Applications and Future Technologies at the European Space Agency, and David Williams head of the British National Space Centre.

The £1.86 million venture is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the East Midlands Development Agency, the Leicestershire Economic Partnership and the university.

Researchers from the university’s Chemistry, Geography and Physics and Astronomy departments will work with the enterprise and business development office to provide the new service.

Paul Monks, director of the partnership, said the exploitation of this technology is expected to have a major impact on business operations and competitiveness.  “We are being pro-active and going out to the business community and saying, ‘What are the issues you would like solving?’, then using a model of innovating, partnering or brokering the solution from our knowledge base.”

“In practical terms, we will work with business partners to develop value-added services that exploit environmental data from the GMES system.”

The partnership will exploit opportunities made available by the €1.4 billion GMES programme, which was set up to apply data from satellite, aerial and ground-based earth observation, to information and decision-making products and services.

John Remedios co-director of the partnership, said the biggest barriers to wide use of satellite data in the UK are knowledge, ease of access and developing solutions which are actually relevant to a given business or public service sector. “Now that the European Commission and European Space Agency have commissioned the GMES programme, there is a paradigm shift in the accessibility of satellite services which gives a real opportunity to overcome previous obstacles. Earth Observation data will become a revolutionary environment information technology, delivering a new, at-your-fingertips ‘view of your world’ in a similar way to GPS for transport and forecasting for weather services. We at Leicester will be using our considerable experience of Earth Observation to build new partnerships and broker existing solutions which can bring this into reality.”