ESA and the European Defence Agency (EDA) are furthering their combined efforts into the study of satellite services for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), through the signing of contracts with two consortia to carry out parallel feasibility studies.

The contracts were signed at the European Defence Agency's 2010 annual conference which took place in Brussels on 9th of February 2010. EDA's Chief Executive, Alexander Weis, signed one contract with EADS Astrium (France) and in parallel ESA's Director of Telecommunications and Integrated Applications, Ms Magali Vaissiere, signed a second contract with INDRA Espacio (Spain).

From an ESA point of view, the studies are expected to prove that satellite services can significantly contribute to paving the way for a broad range of civil and commercial UAS applications. Main drivers for these applications are improved safety, reduced costs, and sustainability, said Ms Vaissiere.

Pursuing the ESA study falls in line with ESA's new Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme. IAP was instigated to promote the development of sustainable operational services for a wide range of users through the combination of different systems demonstrating the added value of space.

The subject of the two feasibility studies is a very good demonstration that space-based services can provide added value to new user communities outside the space domain, explained Ms Vaissiere.

The two studies, conducted in parallel for a duration of six months, will set out to determine:

• The feasibility and the overall planning for a UAS mission, demonstrating that UAS can be integrated into non-segregated airspace using satellite communications and satellite navigation for Command and Control, Sense and Avoid, and Air Traffic Control.
• The added value of satellite communications for high data rate payload links.
• The viability of such a solution for future services based on UAS supported by space systems.
• The investments necessary in the future and the next steps required in technical and regulatory terms to effectively establish such services.
• The roadmap for institutional (e.g. civil protection, crises management) and commercial (e.g. pipe line monitoring) services development.

The advantages to using satellite services for the operations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles include:

• Always-on communication capabilities to all flight levels over a wide geographical range,
• Command, Control and Communications Beyond-Line-of-Sight (BLOS) allowing the UAV pilot to be based at a mission independent central location,
• A payload data return capability providing near real-time access to mission data Beyond-Line-of-Sight.

EDA Chief Executive Alexander Weis highlighted the cooperative spirit between the two organisations. Referring to the overall topic of EDA's Annual Conference Bridging Efforts, he further stressed the need for concrete synergies and result-oriented projects. In this context EDA's initiative on a European Framework Cooperation aims at systematically reaping the benefits of working together with partners such as the European Commission and ESA, including the strategic research area of UAS for air traffic insertion by 2015.

This contract signature marks the first milestone on the common EDA-ESA journey and paves the road for future joint activities extending possibly also to other areas like maritime security and reaching at some point of time a global dimension, concluded Ms Vaissiere.

The first sitting of the Integrated Application Promotion Advisory Committee (IAPAC) took place at ESA headquarters in Paris on 15th January 2010.

The IAP Advisory Committee – IAPAC – has been set up to support the Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) Programme, and to provide external, independent and cross-disciplinary expertise. Its purpose is to support IAP on the identification of the most promising application domains, in order to maximize the likelihood of investment resulting in operational applications meeting citizens’ demand.

IAPAC will make recommendations on the most propitious areas for development into demonstration projects, which applications areas have the greatest potential for the development of IAP, and how this potential may best be realised for the benefits of end-users.

Appropriate Satellite Technology in Support of African Electoral Cycles

SatElections: Appropriate Satellite Technology in Support of African Electoral Cycles, is an innovative project for the production and delivery of eLearning modules on Effective Electoral Assistance and Electoral Administration via satellite.

The SatElections project is receiving the financial support of the Governments of Belgium, Luxembourg and Italy that are funding an industrial consortium coordinated by the European Space Agency (ESA) in the frame of the ARTES 4 Industry Partnership Telecommunications Programme.

The SatElections project is closely interacting with the activities of the European Commission (EC)  United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) - International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) led Global Training Platform on Effective Electoral Assistance, and represents the first step toward validating the fulfillment of the operational communication needs required in African Electoral Cycles. A pilot utilisation of the satcom platform proposed for the SatElections project will be run in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Independent Electoral Commission of the Democratic Republic of Congo (IEC-DRC) is acting as sponsoring partner and user. This Electoral Management Body received the largest aid ever in the context of the EC-UNDP partnership in the area of electoral assistance.

Thanks to the cooperation of the Industrial Partners (Openet, Newtec and SES Astra), the IEC-DCR, and UNDP, EC, International IDEA, the SatElections project aims to:

• produce the first ever eLearning modules on effective electoral assistance and electoral administration
• assess the feasibility of broadcasting the modules with appropriate, cost effective and sustainable satellite technology
• assess the feasibility of using the same satellite technology for creating an internal network for Electoral Management Bodies and for their electoral data transmission

The project will demonstrate, through the real case opportunity of the 2008-2011 Electoral Cycle of the DRC, that the SatElections system and associated services can provide an effective, sustainable and scalable solution in support of African Electoral Cycles.

ESA, TSB and BNSC have organised an IAP event on Transport, Safety and Energy, held at Harwell (UK).

The event attracted a wide number of participants, with more than 140 registrations!

The participants at this well-attended event represented a broad cross-section of stakeholders across users and solution providers.

The presentations covered a broad selection of topics across the thematic domains of Transport, Safety and Energy, and presenting different aspects and views, which can be represented in three groups:

• The user experiences working with solution providers and ESA;
• The solution providers view  on projects ran during the “IAP Preparatory Programme” phase;
• Users who have the first occasion to express their needs and to have dialogue with the space community.

This workshop brought together diverse stakeholders along various value chains of applications. The atmosphere was well captured by good resonance and discussions between speakers and attendees.

In summary, the participants were enthusiastic and there was much fruitful discussion and useful exchanges amongst them, leading to several good new ideas for promising projects.

All presentations are available on a hyperlinked agenda for downloading, which is found on the right hand menu "Related links".

A picture gallery will be posted in the next days.

ITT closing date extended to 23rd Dec. 2009!

One of the most serious threats to human life in sub-Saharan Africa is not war or famine, but the spread of communicable diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. ESA is launching a project that employs satellites to mitigate these problems.

The rampant spread of these communicable diseases is unfortunately killing large numbers across sub-Saharan Africa, and a serious crisis is facing the health workforces across this region. There is a dearth of trained workers, especially in the vast remote regions that are difficult to access and where it is im-practical for those in need to access medical care. The situation is further exacerbated by the lack of telecommunications infrastructure, whether by landline or via mobile networks.

Satellite services are proving to be a very useful means to ameliorate these problems. Remote training of local health workers and tele-diagnosis provided by distant expert centres can be a major step to-wards bringing this dire situation under control. These were the essence of the recommendations of the eHealth Task Force for Africa (ETFA . formerly known as the .Telemedicine Task Force - TTF), which was a collaborative team made up of European organisations, African stakeholders and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Now, the European Space Agency is putting into action the first steps towards implementing the rec-ommendations of the task force, with the launch of a demonstration project. This project will test and validate the functionality of satellite-based health services, and demonstrate its interoperability with terrestrial-based services. The approach involves health worker training and clinical services in se-lected underserved areas, where the interoperability of the systems can be demonstrated.

Every year billions of birds migrate from breeding areas to regions where they spend the winter. The incredible mobility of birds, not only during migration, but also during daily movements between resting and feeding areas is an illustrative example of the variability and complexity of the global environment. Because of such varying movements, birds pose a non-negligible threat to flight safety: in fact, collisions between birds and aircrafts can cause very serious and sometime devastating accidents, with severe consequence in terms of human lives and economic impacts.

In general, aircraft and engines are designed to resist impacts with birds up to certain design conditions, like number of impacts, size and weight of birds, relative speed, etc. Nevertheless there are circumstances when impacts with birds can exceed such safety margins and can lead to permanent and even devastating damage to aircraft. The increase of the safety aspects in the design of aircraft always has a direct economic impact on their overall cost and operations. As such, other means are welcome to reduce the impact of such bird strikes. Currently, these means include, amongst others, scaring sounders, prey birds, hunters, control of the environment, as well as bird-strike reporting.

The bird-strike problem can be classified according to two different scales: “on-route” and “at and near airport”. Considering that birds typically fly below 3,000 feet (915 m), the problem of bird strikes seems to appear either during low-altitude flights (mainly relevant for airforce operations) or near airports (during take-off and landing).

Having identified this need and considering that Space can help Civil Aviation, the Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme has now released an open competitive invitation to tender for a feasibility study to investigate the technical and programmatic issues of a system to mitigate the risk of bird strikes.

For further information please refer to the announcement of this ITT on the IAP website and on EMITS.

ESTEC, 29th May 2008

Close to 70 participants from Dutch, Belgium, French and German military aviation and from Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese civil aviation representatives, including airlines, pilot associations and Airport Authorities attended The FlySafe final presentation on 29 May at ESA's ESTEC facility in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.

The main objective of FlySafe is to prove the viability of an integrated space and non space system capable of reducing bird strike risks for air forces. FlySafe activities were initiated in partnership with Dutch, Belgium, French and German Air Forces and in cooperation with European industry and research institutes during the Preparatory Phase of the ARTES 20 Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) in 2007.

The final presentation opened with a short introduction by ESA on the awareness activities that originated the ESA FlySafe initiative, followed by presentations by Dutch and Belgian Air Forces - FlySafe user representatives - illustrating the status of their operations before and after the FlySafe initiative, including the requirements for the FlySafe initiative.

The FlySafe industrial consortium represented by KNMI, SARA and the University of Amsterdam presented the newly-developed FlySafe system. It combines space (namely earth observation, positioning and telecommunication satellites) and existing terrestrial assets through a system of system approach to deliver information on bird migration at various spatial and time resolutions. Two main demonstration services are currently provided by the system:

• Hourly updated visualisation of bird migration densities covering geographic areas of Belgium and the Netherlands
• Hourly updated three-day forecasts for Belgium and the Netherlands (see http://public.flysafe.sara.nl/bambas/)

Live demonstrations of these two services were shown during the event.

The Netherlands and Belgium Air Forces acknowledged the achievements of the FlySafe initiative stressing that, based on these results, pre-operational services will follow.

A representative from the Finnish Meteorological Institute also encouraged ESA to pursue further expansion of the current FlySafe coverage area and declared his support and commitment for this purpose.

Positive feedback was also gathered from representatives of the Lisbon, Schiphol, Maastricht Aachen, Oostende, Brussels, Liège and Charleroi Airports, as well as from the Dutch Airline Pilots Association, Dutch civil aviation authorities and KLM. They all expressed their appreciation of FlySafe’s impressive results as well as their interest and support in follow-on ESA initiatives on bird strike risk reduction for civil aviation.

“The strong interest and positive feedbacks received from Military and Civil Aviation Authorities during the discussion session are an encouragement for continuing ESA IAP initiative in support of Air Forces for the consolidation phase of the bird strike risk reduction services and to open a new front to meet the demand of civil aviation authorities” says Amnon Ginati, Head of ESA’s Integrated Applications Programme.

ESA acknowledges all FlySafe Partners and Team including the Belgian Air Force, French Air Force, German Air and Royal Netherlands Air Force and UvA(NL), KNMI (NL), SARA (NL), TNO (NL), SOVON (NL), IFV(D), IDA (D), RMI (B), SOI (CH), Meteo France (F), Thales RES (F), TAS (F). ESA extends special thanks to the ESA Belgian and Dutch Delegates, M. Wagner and B. Meijvogel.

Presentations given at the FlySafe final presentation are now available for download by clicking here or on the presentations link located in the top right column of this page. Links to relevant FlySafe resources are also listed under the related links section.

12 May 2009

The final presentation of FlySafe will take place on 29 May in the Newton 2 meeting room at ESA's ESTEC facility in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. All interested parties are invited to attend.

FlySafe aims at establishing a bird-warning system to improve flight safety in northwest Europe for military Air Force operations. FlySafe will deliver a proof-of-concept information system to generate quasi real-time information and forecast of bird migration at various spatial and temporal scales by combining various space and terrestrial assets.

Bird strikes on aircraft pose a real safety threat for both military and civil aviation. Depending on specific circumstances such as the speed of the aircraft, the point of impact, the mass of the bird, the number of birds and the type of aircraft, bird strikes can result in devastating accidents. The annual cost of bird strikes due to damage and delays for the civilian aviation is estimated to be between 1 and 2 billion Euro.

Several issues are being addressed in FlySafe. They include:

• Federation and coordination of the users and their requirements
• Standardisation
• Interoperability
• Increase efficiency of operational systems
• Development of forecast models

Space technologies play an important role for the characterization of global movements of birds by indirectly providing a number of environmental parameters such as; initiation of migration, stopover behaviour, shortage of foods and other parameters used to model and predict bird migration.

ARTES 20 IAP –  the Integrated Applications Promotion programme – initiated FlySafe in June 2007 in partnership with Dutch, Belgium, French and German Air Forces and in cooperation with industry and research institutes from several European countries. It is one of the first activities launched during the preparatory phase of the IAP programme.

All those interested in attending the final presentation of FlySafe are asked to send an email to iap@esa.int. Please enter  “FlySafe Final Presentation” as the subject header or title of your email.

A final presentation agenda and further information can be found in the related links in the top right column of this page. For directions to ESTEC, click here.

This ITT for an IAP Feasibility Study aims at assessing the feasibility, viability and added value of space assets (esp. earth observation data and satellite navigation/positioning tools) for developing predictive risk maps and GIS for mosquito surveillance, control and study in Europe.

You may obtain further information of this ITT on the ESA EMITS website, with the menu "Open Invitations to Tender" under the ITT number AO6088.