Telespazio UK is a leading provider of products and services related to Earth Observation product generation including data quality control/assurance and calibration. The expertise covers a wealth of sensor/instrument types (e.g Optical/Radar) for a range for traditional institutional missions, as well as commercial missions.

This extensive expertise has been developed over ten years of leadership of the Instrument Data Evaluation and Analysis Service (IDEAS+) on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA). The service spans ESA’s Flagship Earth Explorer series of satellites (e.g. Cryosat, SMOS), Envisat and ERS reprocessed products, and third party missions (e.g. US Landsat series). The service continues to be led by Telespazio UK as part of the new Quality Assurance for Earth Observation (QA4EO) service. IDEAS+/QA4EO responsibilities include management of expert science teams and development/update of QC tools and product processors.

This in-depth EO product expertise has been combined with Telespazio UK’s data processing and management capabilities to provide operational S/W developments such as the ESA EarthCARE mission’s Integrity & Calibration Monitoring Facility (ICMF).

Furthermore, in response to the growing number of National and Commercial ‘New-space’ missions, Telespazio UK has expanded its EO data QC capabilities to address the wealth of new products being made available by these missions. This work is being performed on behalf of ESA for the Earthnet Data Assessment Pilot (EDAP) and is a critical activity in assessing the suitability of these new products for scientifically demanding applications.

Telespazio UK has recognised the pressing need to more extensively automate the handling of the ever increasing amounts of data produced by new satellites. As such, Telespazio UK is developing new set of Artificial Intelligence-enabled S/W tools as part of the Ease-QC product suite. Ease-QC provides the tools to train advance Machine Learning algorithms to detect subtle anomalies within EO products. The tools are being developed to allow deployment within state-of-the-art satellite ground segment systems that use the latest Big Data and Cloud computing technologies.