The European Space Agency (ESA) released a new animation showing the long tour that the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft will take to reach Jupiter and explore it’s icy moons. Continue Reading
The High Resolution LandCover (HRLC) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project funded by ESA invites the Climate Research Community members to participate in the first virtual meeting that will take place on Friday, 8th of February 2019 from 2pm to 4 pm.
On Tuesday January 15, ExtremeEarth project started with the kick-off meeting at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Interview of Prof. Bruzzone on the European Space Agency project that RSLab is coordinating on the use of remote sensing satellites for land cover mapping for climate change monitoring and analysis. The interview is published on the national magazine “La Nuova Ecologia.”
The International Workshop on the Analysis of MultiTemporal Remote Sensing Images (MultiTemp 2019) will be held in Shanghai, China in the period August 5-7, 2019. This is the 10th edition of the workshop series that was established and founded from the RSLab in 2001 (first and sixth editions in Trento).
If you wish to stay informed about the MultiTemp conference you need to register on the MultiTemp 2019 event website (https://multitemp2019.tongji.edu.cn/info/1077/1132.htm) to keep receiving news and updates via email.
More information and important dates can be found on the MultiTemp 2019 website, http://multitemp2019.tongji.edu.cn
RSLab achieved very good research results in 2018 on both Earth Observation and Planetary Exploration and the related research topics. Continue Reading
Lorenzo Bruzzone is the Vice-President for Professional Activities of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) for 2019.
Elena Donini received the award for the 2017 Best Italian Theses on Remote Sensing by the Italian Chapter of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. The award was presented by Prof Antonio Iodice, who is the chapter chair. The title of the thesis is “Simulation and Extraction of Lava Tubes Features from Radar Sounder Data of the Moon” (Advisors: Prof Lorenzo Bruzzone and Dr Francesca Bovolo).
ESA engineers tested A 1:18 scale model of the RIME antenna – Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (Principal Investigator: Prof. Lorenzo Bruzzone) together with a simplified model of the JUICE spacecraft in the ESTEC’s HERTZ facility. Several tests were performed, for different solar array orientations, with the objective of collecting a set of data that can be compared with the results obtained through the simulations and thus validate the design and verification approach.
Minuaturised JUICE spacecraft and RIME antenna during electromagnetic compatibility tests at ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands. Credit: ESA–M. Cowan
The antenna measurements were performed by rotating the scaled model and the RIME antenna along two axes, in order to measure the electric near field on a spherical surface in the vicinity of the scaled model. The near field data were then processed to obtain the far field performance, which is of particular interest because it more closely resembles real antenna performance.
This test campaign was a proof of concept that enabled fine-tuning of all relevant parameters. At a later stage, the antenna’s performance will be simulated with a high-fidelity model of the spacecraft, which will include all possible features that can influence the antenna pattern. These results will serve as inputs for the RIME instrument team to derive the overall inflight performance of the instrument.
In the meanwhile the photo of the RIME’s antenna test was featured as ESA Space Science Image of the Week.
The ESA project “Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions (SEOM) Multitemporal Analysis (MTA)” (coordinated and developed by RSLab) successfully passed its Final Review. The project was about the development of automatic techniques for the analysis of the big data acquired by Sentinel-2 multispectral system in in the context of three application and methodological areas:
(1) Time series analysis, focused on the processing of image time series for precision agriculture.
(2) Change detection and attribution, focused on the analysis of bi-temporal images for detection of forest disturbances.
(3) Land cover maps updating, focused on the use of recent images for unsupervised updating of thematic maps.
The output of the project was very good. For this reason ESA is funding one additional year of activities in order to apply the developed methods to the analysis of images at Italian country scale using european cloud computing infrastructures. For further details visit http://rslab.disi.unitn.it/projects/mta/.