Telespazio UK, in collaboration with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), has recently been awarded a contract by the European Space Agency (ESA) to examine how to better understand and improve the quality assurance of the end-to-end Earth Observation (EO) supply chain.

This activity is being carried out in partnership with the European Association of Remote Sensing Companies (EARSC) and is supported by the British Association of Remote Sensing Companies (BARSC), the UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult and Space4Climate.

The EOSure project will carry out:

  • An EO industry-wide survey to understand user metadata, validation and certification requirements throughout the EO supply chain
  • A pilot EO Industry Certification activity, certifying 10 organisations to the EARSC Quality Management System (QMS) certification scheme
  • A pilot Product Certification process, investigating the need for a scheme to certify EO products, and identifying and piloting the approach for the EO product chain.

Within the next couple of months, the project team will also be sending out the EO Industry survey, and will ask that as many companies as possible take part. This will be an opportunity to have your say, and influence future changes to EO metadata standards and EO certification!

Geoff Busswell, Telespazio UK’s Head of Marketing and Sales, said: “We are very pleased to be working with ESA, EARSC and NPL on this crucial initiative to create and promote international standards and move towards certification to reinforce quality assurance in Earth Observation. It’s so important to have the right standards in place that encourage the necessary information to be available about satellite-derived data sets. This ultimately breeds trust from the user community and enables them to make informed choices on the data to use for their application, and to have confidence in the decisions they ultimately make.”

Cyrus Larijani, Strategic Business Development Manager for Space at NPL said: “NPL is delighted to be working with Telespazio and ESA on this project to deliver traceability in the systems developed to improve the quality assurance of the EO supply chain. This project forms an integral part of NPL’s wider strategy to deliver highly accurate, actionable climate data, underpinned by metrology, which senior decision-makers can trust when developing and implementing key environmental policies.”