On Oct. 25, 2016, winners in the Copernicus Masters Earth-observation competition were recognized before an international audience in Madrid, Spain. The grand prize went to the team from Slovenia's Sinergise Ltd., whose Sentinel Hub cloud-based web service for satellite data won the T-Systems Open Telekom Cloud Challenge before edging out winners of the other six categories.
NASA introduced the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute (S3VI), hosted at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., to leverage the growing small spacecraft (i.e., SmallSat) community, promote innovation, identify emerging technology opportunities, and provide an efficient channel for communication about small spacecraft systems with industry, academia and other government agencies.
Airbus Defence and Space, The Forest Trust (TFT) and SarVision developed the Starling service, which enables companies to provide evidence of how they're implementing their No Deforestation commitments. Starling uses a combination of high-resolution optical satellite and radar imagery to provide unbiased monitoring of forest-cover change.
In 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a trio of Swarm satellites to monitor Earth's magnetic field. According to a research paper published in Science Advances on Sept. 30, 2016, the satellites were able to measure a faint magnetic field created by oceans that led to discoveries about Earth's electrical nature.
The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) selected a team from the University of Nairobi to be the first to benefit from the UNOOSA-JAXA KiboCUBE program.
