Insider Brief:
- Kuva Space has secured a €1.8M contract to participate in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Civil Security from Space (CSS) program.
- The program will include a field study with the Finnish authorities to enhance border surveillance along the Baltic Sea area between Finland, Estonia, and Sweden.
- Kuva Space, in collaboration with the Finnish authorities, will demonstrate the automatic detection of marine vessels using hyperspectral imaging and its advanced AI platform.
Kuva Space, a Finnish hyperspectral satellite and AI-powered insights company, announced it has secured a €1.8M contract to participate in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Civil Security from Space (CSS) program. The three-year R&D program aims to provide advanced hyperspectral situational awareness information to monitor and mitigate civil security and crisis events.
Under the CSS program, Kuva Space will focus on testing and developing on-board hyperspectral data processing, satellite-to-satellite, and satellite-to-IoT mobile communication. This initiative includes a field study with the Finnish authorities to enhance border surveillance along the Baltic Sea area between Finland, Estonia, and Sweden.
The CSS program seeks to utilize spaceborne solutions to swiftly support humanitarian responses, law enforcement, safety, and emergency events. Jarkko Antila, CEO of Kuva Space, emphasizes the importance of delivering information to first responders promptly for environmental, humanitarian, and security benefits.
Currently, the civil security domain faces challenges such as limited resources, data access, and big data handling. To address these challenges, five nations under ESA have contributed funding to create SMART-CONNECT, a consortium led by Austrian company Geoville. Kuva Space, along with other technology actors, aims to revolutionize crisis communication by providing a middleware solution for secure end-to-end data interconnectivity.
Gordon Campbell, Head of Enterprise at ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes Directorate, discussed the significance of hyperspectral data for civil security applications. Kuva Space’s involvement in the SMART-CONNECT consortium is crucial, given its expertise in hyperspectral systems.
Kuva Space, in collaboration with the Finnish authorities, will demonstrate the automatic detection of marine vessels using hyperspectral imaging and its advanced AI platform. This includes creating alerts for vessels with no Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) signal, which may indicate criminal activity.
Moreover, Kuva Space will develop calibrated data products to automatically detect wildfires and landslide scarps, providing their coordinates to civil security platforms within ten minutes of transmission.
Looking forward, Kuva Space is focused on building the world’s most extensive hyperspectral satellite constellation and an AI-powered insights-as-a-service model. With three successful satellite missions, Kuva Space plans to launch two hyperspectral satellites and its initial services in 2024. The first satellite, Hyperfield-1, is scheduled to launch in July 2024, with the aim of deploying up to 100 satellites by 2030.
In recent years, Kuva Space has achieved significant milestones, including being awarded a €5M commercial contract to provide hyperspectral data services for the EU Copernicus program and winning the NATO Innovation Challenge for its AI-driven analytics for enhanced Arctic monitoring capabilities.
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