EO Market Trends
EO MARKET TRENDS The rest of this report will focus on the key drivers of change impacting the EO industry, including processing, distributing and creating insights from EO data.
Figure 8: Historical trend in ESA’s EO data archives (1986-2010) and future projections
Technological VOLUME
OF DATA INCREASING
Operational commercial EO satellites were collecting more than 4 million square kilometres of imagery every day, as recently as 201357. In the next five years ESA spacecraft alone will obtain about 25 petabytes of EO data58 as a result of the Copernicus programme. Source: ESA (2013)59
Some of the key trends driving the significant increase in volume of data include:
Figure 9: Number of civilian EO near-polar orbiting satellites launched per year
• Improvements in mission technology – more EO satellites are being launched by developed and emerging space nations, with increased reliability of EO satellite missions contributing to more launches and an upsurge in the volume of EO data collected. • Trend towards small satellites – by bringing the cost down and accessibility up, small satellite technologies are lowering the barriers for new entrants to the EO market. Commercial small satellite business models are attracting private funding. 1) Improvements in mission technology The number of satellites orbiting the Earth with an EO mission has increased as a function of reliability and mission longevity60, with the average number of satellites launched increasing from approximately 2 in the 1970s to 12 in 2012. The number of failing missions within 3 years of launch has dropped since the 1970s from around 60% to less than 20%, resulting in an extended average mission operational lifespan that is almost 3 times higher today, increasing from 3.3 years to 8.6 years61. 57 58
Note: The horizontal dotted line represents the average number of launches per decade, respectively: 2 - 1970s; 2.7 – 1980s; 4.8 – 1990s; 7.4 – 2000s; 12 – 2010s Source: Belward and Skøien (2014), in International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Inc. (ISPRS)
Navulur et al (2013) Demystifying Cloud Computing for Remote Sensing Applications, Earthwide Communications LLC Di Meglio et al., (2014) CERN Openlab Whitepaper on Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research, see www.zenodo.org/record/8765# retrieved on 9th February 2015
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