Satellites pictures ©ESAThe ESA Heritage Missions Virtual Lab launches on EarthConsole®
A virtual space offering customized data processing services to harness the invaluable legacy left by the Heritage Missions, all accessible with a single sign-on: this is the ESA Heritage Missions Virtual Lab which has been officially launched today on the EarthConsole® platform powered by Progressive Systems.
The Heritage Missions consist of over 45 non-operational earth observation missions, including cornerstone ESA missions such as the European Remote Sensing satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, and ENVISAT. These missions acquired data from various optical, radar, and atmospheric instruments for over 40 years.
The preservation of data coming from these missions is of key importance for the ongoing environmental research on our planet. When combined with data from new satellites, Heritage Missions data provides a unique opportunity to look back in time and build long-term data series on a diverse range of applications such as climate change, sea levels, surface temperatures, melting ice, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, atmospheric composition, deforestation, urban mapping and much more.
The Lab has been established with exactly this mission in mind: to assist research centers and universities in gaining a deeper understanding of the evolution of Earth dynamics over time, by leveraging Heritage Missions data and related processors.
Our goal with EarthConsole® has always been to make it easier for users to access and utilize earth observation data. As we continue to expand and improve the platform, we remain committed to this objective. The new Heritage Missions Virtual Lab on EarthConsole® maintains the unique features of the platform, including the ability to co-locate data and the processing capacity. This reduces the impact on data transfer, and enables the completion of large-scale processing campaigns within the project’s specified time frame.
In addition, by entrusting the management of processing campaigns and IT infrastructure to our team of experts, researchers can focus entirely on their research goals without worrying about the technical activities.
We want to keep on providing researchers and scientists with the necessary support to achieve their research objectives on time and with minimal distractions.
Giancarlo Rivolta,
CEO at Progressive Systems
The Lab offers researchers and scientists a range of possibilities to process and analyze Heritage Missions data.
One of its key features is the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) processor, provided by IREA, a scientific and technological research institute belonging to the largest Italian research institution, the National Research Council (CNR). The service generates soil deformation maps and time series from ERS and ENVISAT data. With this processor, users can choose to perform bulk processing campaigns (supervised by EarthConsole® experts) or on-demand processing tasks (independently managed by the user via the P-PRO ON DEMAND platform). Researchers can also receive expert support to integrate additional processors into the EarthConsole® high-performance computing environment.
The Lab also provides ready-to-use virtual machines for algorithm development, testing and post-processing analysis equipped with instant cloud data access, software for Heritage data analysis & visualization already installed and flexible computing resources and storage.
Last but not least with a view to supporting an open science approach, the Lab makes available a set of tools to network and share research results with colleagues, including a thematic forum, a repository of processed datasets, and a library with relevant publications and media for consultation.
If you plan to use the lab services for research, educational, or pre-commercial purposes, you may be eligible to submit a sponsorship request to the ESA Network of Resources. If your application will be successful, it would allow you to receive a voucher that may fully cover the costs of the services.
Interested researchers can register to the Lab by following the provided instructions to join and the forms available via the lab to request the services.
