Telespazio UK, a subsidiary of Telespazio (a joint venture between Leonardo, 67%, and Thales, 33%), has been awarded a contract by the European Space Agency (ESA) to deliver its Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment (EarthCODE). This project envisions leveraging technology to empower Fair and Open Earth System Science, fostering innovation and collaboration for a sustainable future.
Working with EOX as our partner, EarthCODE will be developed as an open architecture, using open source building blocks and integrating commercial platform services (for Earth Observation (EO) data, processing, storage, etc.). The architecture will offer an effective, efficient and attractive environment to conduct Earth System Science collaboratively, with convenient means to discover, access and work with EO and other geospatial data. It will also manage the full lifecycle of data, code, documentation and other research artifacts of Science Cluster activities, manage end-to-end scientific experiments and interact with the community.
EarthCODE is being developed on top of existing platform services and will leverage the latest tools for managing open data and open-source software. It aims to grow a community of users that contributes open data and methods, discover scientific datasets and workflows, access advanced computing resources and collaborate to advance earth science. EarthCODE will incrementally develop by integrating readily available EO cloud services and open-source building blocks provided by European industry. It also serves as a platform for Open Science capacity building, scientific communication and international cooperation.
Alexandra Barker, Deputy Head of Marketing and Sales, Telespazio UK, said: “EarthCODE will deliver a cloud-based, user-centric development environment providing a reusable Science R&D repository to support the execution of science projects. We’re delighted to reuse some of the ESA EOEPCA Building Blocks in this initiative to deliver the platform architecture to support best-practice FAIR, Open Science – with access to data, compute resources, services and tooling for development and community.”
Supplier webinar on 17 April
A supplier webinar is planned for Wednesday 17 April 2024 at 12.30pm UK / 1.30pm CET to engage with organisations who want to participate in developing the three work streams (WS) being tendered:
- WS1 – Infrastructure
The infrastructure work stream will provide the necessary computational resources for the development and execution of scientific workflows by the ESA Science Clusters activities, building on existing services (primarily from the Network of Resources (NoR) offering). - WS2 – FAIR Open Science
The FAIR Open Science work stream is to provide the necessary tools and means for researchers to manage their scientific workflows in full compliance with FAIR and Open Science principles. - WS3 – Community
The Community work stream will provide the necessary means for managing the EarthCODE community (including the developers, contributors and users).
Participants wishing to attend the webinar should register by Tuesday 16 April 2024 at 12.30pm UK / 1.30pm CET.