Building an innovation-led international space partnership

As part of Telespazio UK’s commitment to extending our influence and applying our specialist space capabilities on the global stage through building collaborations with domestic and international experts, we have established a partnership with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Australia’s Symbios Communications, supported by CSIRO and Geoscience Australia, to develop the Quality Assurance Framework Facility (QAFF) for Earth Observation (EO) data.

The consortium is among the first raft of projects involving British space companies to have received funding from the initial phase of the UK Space Agency’s International Bilateral Fund. With a focus on space research and catalysing investment in new technologies, the £20 million International Bilateral Fund aims to advance the UK’s goals in space by encouraging and promoting pioneering collaborations between UK space organisations and their counterparts in Australia, the US, Canada, Japan, India, Singapore and South Africa. This is part of a wider UK Government programme of boosting awareness and application of UK innovation on the global stage.

The QAFF will combine deliverables from Telespazio UK, NPL and Symbios into a single platform to support QA activities across the EO supply chain, including the provision of an EO data validation library, QA tools and support. This will see all QA resources consolidated into a single platform for the benefit of all space organisations, combining a free and open access policy, where possible.

The platform builds upon the definition of QA tools by the partners:

  • Telespazio UK’s Quality Assurance Facility (QAF) – a platform defined as part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) EOSure project to support QA activities across the EO supply chain, including the provision of an EO data validation library, QA tools and support to organisations wishing to follow EARSC’s EO certification scheme.
  • Earth Observation Assurance & Integrity Monitoring (EO-AIM) facility – to be hosted by the Australian Government, seeks to develop and support automated, open-source tools, standards and communities with access to in-situ calibration/validation data to mainstream QA of New Space missions.
  • NPL’s Quality Assurance Interoperability Engine (QuAIE) – supports production of an invariant reference dataset for EO data.

This QAFF aims to integrate the capabilities of the three QA facility concepts to define an international QA resource that has the backing of ESA and Committee on Earth Observation Satellites, in addition to the UK and Australian Governments.

The platform architecture itself will consider that of the UK EO Data Architecture – an interoperable EO Data Hub designed to provide federated EO data access and discovery, interoperability, transparency and trustworthiness – by ensuring the Hub and platforms operate on common standards, together with a dedicated QA service.

Ally Barker, Deputy Head of Sales & Marketing at Telespazio UK, said: "This project recognises that data quality is essential to the success and economic prosperity of the space sector. It will move forward an aligned proposition on EO data QA as an offering to the international community with the support of CSIRO and Geoscience Australia. We are truly excited to foster our partnership with colleagues in Australia to define a coordinated platform and expand our European QA tools and services to an international forum."