Workshop Outline
There will be contributions from ESA and from four members of the Flanders Space “imaging4space” thematic working group Caeleste, IMEC, Redwire and GIM. ESA will give an overview of the “optical imaging sensor” harmonisation working group activities. The imaging for space subject will be described in a European technology context and in the context of the renewed interest in European component supply autonomy. Caeleste is a full-turn key custom image sensor design house for “beyond-state-of-the-art” image sensors for high-performance applications, such as imagers for Space, scientific imagers, industrial vision, medical imaging and life science sensing. Caeleste is flying a set of image sensors in missions for ESA and other space actors. Caeleste will explain the importance for an SME of its participation in a regional innovative ecosystem for a sustainable growth and specialisation in the space sector. Imec will speak about elevating the performance of Small Satellites imaging. Imec will present “on chip spectral imaging”: Monolithic & Hybrid Integration of Multi/Hyperspectral Filters. Imec has demonstrated the development of on chip spectral detectors with various types of filters, geometrically patterned and on a broad range of detectors spanning a wide spectral range within development projects for ESA and external customers. The MOVIQ project deals with radiation-hard pixel post-processing hardware, which is capable of compensating for satellite / camera movements. As a result, exceptionally sharp images can be obtained. Redwire Space is an experienced small satellite missions prime contractor and ESA’s smallsat platform integrator and mission provider of choice. Redwire is well-known for three previous “PROBA” small satellite missions delivered as prime contractor for the European Space Agency. Redwire will outline the importance of the proposed Flemish innovative ecosystem for a satellite manufacturer and mission integrator in developing a long term vision on future mission requirements. GIM has more than 20 years of experience in complex geodata integration & analytics projects and information extraction on the basis of satellite imagery. GIM’s earth observation team selects, processes, analyses and interprets images from a wide range of partners and turns them into useful insights for different business application domains using recent technological advances in the domain of artificial intelligence and deep learning applied to Earth Observation data. GIM will present its view on customer downstream services. Since the world is changing rapidly and the environmental and climate evolution is a key challenge of different places across the globe, more than ever, insights derived from earth observation data are crucial and thanks to today’s technical evolutions the possibilities for satellite, aerial and drone images are growing by the day. The overall objective of the workshop is to present an advanced long term view on research in the topic of Imaging for Space and to give the audience a flavour of the strength of regional collaboration in this innovative ecosystem.
