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Heritage Missions satellites orbiting the EarthSatellites pictures ©ESA

The ESA Heritage Missions Virtual Lab launches on EarthConsole®

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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.

This is a project supported by the ESA Network of Resources initiative.

EarthConsole® on the OCRE Earth Observation Catalogue for Research

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EarthConsole®, powered by Progressive Systems, has been registered in the OCRE Earth Observation (EO) Catalogue for Research and its offering may now be selected by EO funding for research winners.

OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union that aims to enable and facilitate research institutions to use commercial digital services in a safe and easy manner.

EO and cloud-based services offer the European research community a wealth of powerful tools, but for many researchers, these are currently out of reach, with suitable services difficult to find and select.

The OCRE project wants to address this need by making it easier to procure both Cloud and EO services. The EO Catalogue is a key result of such a project which aims to create a digital single marketplace for commercial EO and Cloud services for research in Europe.

The Earth Observation Catalogue is a useful tool for EO Funding for Research winners to find validated cloud and digital services which respond to the research and education communities’ requirements, saving institutions the time-consuming and complex process of doing this by themselves. For each of the EO Funding for Research winners, at least three of the EO companies in the OCRE EO Catalogue will be shortlisted to choose from. Then, based on the requirements and criteria of the research project and the response from these suppliers, a provider will be awarded, fulfilling the minimum requirements for a fair procurement.

Find EarthConsole® in the catalogue!

Progressive Systems launches EarthConsole™

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The all-in-one-solution to make the most of Earth Observation Data

An all-in-one cloud-based platform to assist researchers, innovators and service providers in optimizing the way in which they exploit Earth Observation data to analyse and keep track of our changing planet.

This is EarthConsole™, the new platform of Progressive Systems bringing Earth Observation data access, algorithm development, integration and processing services, analysis and visualization tools, powerful computing resources and high-speed network connections, all in one place. A comprehensive service which builds on the consolidated experience of the Research and Service Support (RSS) service Progressive Systems has operated for more than a decade on behalf of ESA, and which has supported hundreds of EO data users all over the world.

EarthConsole™ offers three main solutions:

  • G-BOX: an environment enabling users to develop and test algorithms, providing a virtual machine on a cloud infrastructure with fast access to Earth Observation data, customizable and flexible computing resources which is accessible from any location, any device and at any time;
  • P-PRO: the parallel processing service, allowing to process huge volumes of data in a faster and efficient manner thanks to a reliable cloud-based technology able to optimise the computing resources ;
  • I-APP: the application integration service of EarthConsole™, providing expert support to prepare software for integration in the Parallel Processing environment for massive processing.

All EarthConsole™ solutions offer a high degree of flexibility as they are customizable to a diverse extent on users’ needs.

The “Bring User to Data” has been one of key success factors of RSS and it will be a key pillar of the EarthConsole™ platform as well. But our objective with EarthConsole™ is to take it a step further and implement a user-centred evolution process. Users are encouraged to share their feedback, inputs and requirements on the platform with the objective of integrating these emerging customers-generated ideas into future developments of EarthConsole ™ .

declared Giancarlo Rivolta, CEO at Progressive Systems.

EarthConsole™ services are also available via the Network of EO Resources, a new ESA initiative enabling EO data users to procure and compare cloud-based services. Users with a research, development or pre-commercial project may receive an ESA voucher to benefit from EarthConsole™ services free of charge or at very advantageous prices.

Visit www.earthconsole.eu for more information.