Pascal Legai,
European Union Satellite Centre, Spain
Title: Earth observation for security and defence: The European Union Satellite Centre experience and future views
Biography
Biography: Pascal Legai,
Abstract
The European Union Satellite Centre (SatCen) supports the decision-making and actions of the European Union in the field of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), in particular Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). It thus addresses European Union crisis management missions and operations, by providing products and services resulting from the exploitation of relevant space assets and collateral data, including satellite imagery and aerial imagery, and related services. For fulfilling its tasks, SatCen cooperates with numerous national, European and international institutions in the field of remote sensing from space and works with image providers, public, commercial or governmental ones as well as with open source information. From its unique role and position in the remote sensing operational chain for security and defense, SatCen is following carefully the fast evolution of the remote sensing field: the needs from the end users but also of the techniques as well as the provided services and innovation from industry. In particular, the users ‘requirements, asking from near real time service, imply to have more frequent data acquisition as well as faster data processing and analysis. On the other hand, the increasing volume of available data collides with the limitation of image analyst staffing, imposing to extract the information close by the data generation, at upstream level, as well as to rely on automatic tools to focus analysts work on the most complex and demanding issues. The presentation will thus expose the analysis of SatCen, taking the benefits of its 25 years operational experience, on the fast evolving environment of remote sensing for security and defense, to identify the most important challenges to face at technical, operational and staff levels.
