Seamless Cloud-Native Solution: Maximizing EO/SAR Data Potential

In the Earth Observation (EO) world, the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is vital for a multitude of purposes, including environmental monitoring, economic analysis, and defence initiatives. In pursuit of making a substantial impact on both Canadian and global scales, EarthDaily Analytics (EDA) participated in a project funded by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). This project seeks to harness the power of remote sensing SAR data to address critical challenges while ensuring cost-effectiveness in the process.

The Challenge of Creating a Cost-Effective Ground Segment

As the demand for EO data continues to grow, the need for a cost-effective ground segment to support data discovery, access, processing, and exploitation has never been more apparent. Traditionally, the EO industry has been characterized by expensive services that hindered widespread adoption. Even large missions face substantial challenges in meeting end-user needs due to factors like software maintenance, extensive operational teams, high storage, and computing demands. However, despite these efforts, midstream and downstream operations in the ground segment, including commissioning, calibration, processing, and quality assurance, continue to present significant cost and efficiency challenges.

Objectives and Progress of the SAR EDS Prototype

The SAR Earth Data Store (EDS) prototype, a pivotal project within the Earth observation landscape, is a testament to the collaborative efforts between EDA and the CSA. Its key objective is twofold: to showcase foundational cloud infrastructure principles and to demonstrate advanced SAR processing features. While the project collaboration between EDA and the CSA has successfully concluded, EDA continues to enhance the Earth Data Store (EDS) in-house. This ongoing development focuses on the incremental addition of new features and functionality to the EDS Platform. The collaboration with CSA was instrumental, enabling us to integrate advanced SAR processing capabilities that address critical challenges in Earth Observation, into the platform. This cooperative effort exemplifies our commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology to improve data accessibility and efficiency.

The current features of the SAR EDS prototype include:

• Cost-effective and scalable SAR Processing, catering to both data-driven and on-demand processing of EO Data.
• A secure and highly reliable cloud-based archive.
• Automated rule-based data storage tier movement and archived data restoration.
• Support for metadata queries and catalog queries for SAR Products.
• Secure authenticated access and download of full-resolution SAR Products.
• Efficient access to desired pixels of interest via tiles served through the Exploitation API.
• The ability to interface with the Ordering and Archive APIs through the Python Software Client Library.
• Support for an immutable ledger audit trail of the processing transaction.

The project also incorporates advanced cloud infrastructure and deployment functionalities, ensuring one-click deployment, rapid deployment and teardown of multiple independent instances, automated test suite coverage, disaster recovery capabilities, cloud security measures, serverless computing, and comprehensive monitoring of cloud activities and costs associated with EDS activities.

Project Objectives and Their Significance

We’ve successfully delivered a cloud-native Earth Observation (EO) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Earth Data Store (EDS) Prototype as part of this project. The prototype utilizes EO data. Key features include Software as a Service (SaaS), managed infrastructure, rapid provisioning, auto-scalability, minimal downtime, and support for various processing options.

The SAR EDS prototype aims to showcase cloud infrastructure principles and advanced SAR processing, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, latency, and cost-effectiveness. Leveraging existing EDS technology, it’s set to revolutionize EO/SAR data discovery, access, processing, and exploitation. With features like cost-effective SAR processing and secure cloud archives, the prototype addresses industry challenges. Advanced cloud functionalities enable easy deployment, disaster recovery, and monitoring. Incremental feature additions will expand SAR data applications. This collaboration signifies progress in EO capabilities, benefitting Canada and beyond.

In conclusion this project signifies a significant step forward in making EO data more accessible, affordable, and efficient for a wide range of applications.

Finally, we extend our thanks to the Canadian Space Agency for their funding support and trust in advancing Earth observation capabilities. This project signifies progress for the future of EO data utilization, benefitting not only Canada but the global community.