Instantaneous Infrastructure Monitoring by Earth Observation

Critical infrastructures including transport of goods and persons or the supply of energy and water are the lifelines of our globalized society. With the global scale of these systems arises a task of similar magnitude: multiple extended and intersecting networks require maintenance, which in turn is only possible through constant monitoring. Currently, this demand is met by a variety of services, including sensor networks or on-demand, manual monitoring via airborne. These processes are costly, difficult to implement in remote areas and poorly scalable. Sustainability and costefficiency dictate the capacity of services to be laid out for routine tasks, yet natural disasters such as storms may affect significant fractions of a network within a short period of time. Any ground-bound or airborne monitoring system is bound to struggle with this type of situation, as they are limited by the number of available units, which themselves may be further impeded by severe weather conditions.

Objective

The goal of this project to design, implement and demonstrate key technological factors of a future satellite-based EO system capable of providing functions necessary for instantaneous monitoring of infrastructures in near real time. This includes the selection and specification of suitable hardware, i.e. sensor candidates, individual processors for off-board processing of data at the ground and for on-board processing meeting the requirements posed by operation in LEO, and a communications system concept applicable to a scalable constellation of satellites. This needs to be accompanied by the development of carefully tailored software, optimized in particular for on-board processing and preselection of data.

More information is available on the project website.

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