The billionaires who want to use satellites to save the world

Bill and Melinda Gates talk to reporters in New York. File photo: Seth Wenig/AP

Bill and Melinda Gates talk to reporters in New York. File photo: Seth Wenig/AP

Published Feb 27, 2017

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Seattle - Some of the

world's most influential billionaire philanthropists plan to

launch a powerful digital platform to harness the avalanche of

data sent from satellites each day - and make it freely

available for humanitarian and environmental causes.

Bill and Melinda Gates - who are also custodians of

legendary investor Warren Buffet's billions – have joined forces

with Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, to fund the 'Radiant

Earth' project, a repository and archive of the world's

satellite, aerial and drone imagery.

The project, expected to cost "multi millions" of dollars,

aims to find ways to combine and analyse Earth data and imagery

and offer it free of charge in formats that do not require

specific expertise to understand.

Anne Hale Miglarese, Radiant CEO, said the world is now

awash in data but for non specialists, finding it and creating

ways to use it practically can be both difficult and expensive.

"(Radiant) will help build the 'who, what, where when or

why' for the planning and management of issues such as land

tenure, global health, sustainable development, food security

and disaster response," she said.

Data growth

The Gates Foundation invited more than 150 academics and

data analysis specialists to Seattle last week for what was

billed as a 'Thought Leaders Summit' on the project.

Experts discussed what humanitarian agencies, environmental

and land rights groups might want and need.

Amazon Web Services Global Open Data chief, Jed Sundwall,

said Radiant would try to "give humans back their time to focus

on research and analysis".

"Open data is happy data: we have so much data that can tell

us about our world but we can't know it because it is too

expensive to know it," he said.

Industry experts said over the past five years the number of

operational satellites has jumped 40 percent, and nearly 1,400

now orbit the Earth.

This number could more than double over the next five years

as satellites become smaller, lighter and more affordable.

Entrepreneurs have increasingly begun to view the sky as a

new market which can help feed the burgeoning global demand for

more communications, satellite TV and broadband services.

However satellites are also collecting data from space about

the Earth itself. Applications are far reaching - from tracking

plant health through chlorophyll to gauging the impact of

natural disasters and the surveillance of illegal logging.

Two weeks ago, India launched 104 satellites – 101 of them

for foreign companies and agencies - in a single mission as part

of its strategic bid for a bigger share of the $300 billion

global space industry.

Experts at the Seattle summit said the multiple launch,

described as a world record by its space agency, was also

significant because 88 were shoebox-sized Dove satellites

launched by Planet, a San Francisco-based private satellite

operator founded by former NASA scientists.

The constellation of small satellites will, once settled

into orbit in six months' time, will photograph the entire Earth

every day.

The new explorers

"Satellite imagery might be one of the most powerful and

unbiased tools to tell people what is going on with the planet"

Albert Lin, Research Scientist at the University of California,

San Diego, told the summit.

The key, he said, lay in finding ways to translate enormous

amounts of information into something that can be understood by

everyone.

This means finding ways of sorting and interlinking the

trillions of bits of data sent to Earth and re-construct them

into readable, digital and sometimes 3D models.

In some cases, data can be analysed with the help of

communities of "citizen scientists sitting alone at their

computers all over the world".

"This is a wake-up call that satellite imagery is not just

about questions and insights but also about engaging the entire

planet in observing the planet, together," he said.

Some of these techniques were used to map the New Zealand

city of Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake and in the search

for the Malaysian Airlines jet that went missing in 2014, he

said.

Lin said his laboratory, the California Institute for

Telecommunications and Information Technology, can explore the

world without disturbing a sod of soil.

He led a team that tried to find Genghis Khan's tomb in one

of the most remote parts of Mongolia, a quest that has

fascinated historians and scientists for centuries.

Mongolians believe the tomb to be sacred and any disturbance

of its site a portent of disaster.

Data analysts from Australia to Norway scoured satellite and

geo-spatial data from the most remote parts of the Mongolian

mountains. They helped to spot ancient structures seen only from

space that helped to guide the team on the ground on horseback

to pinpoint the most likely sites.

Ultimately, said Radiant CEO Miglarese, the new platform

will foster more informed decision-making about the Earth's

resources.

The team also hopes Radiant will encourage the creation of

more open source technologies and innovation that can help

"solve societies' most pressing issues."

"Radiant is about using Earth imagery for positive global

impact," she said.

* Omidyar Network, founded by Pierre Omidyar, partners with

the Thomson Reuters Foundation on its property rights coverage. 

Thomson Reuters Foundation

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