National Space Strategy Published

The National Space Strategy Consultation of July 2018 got some useful info and feedback - as part of the SCSI RS & EO working group we provided feedback from the mapping/built environment/property sectors - and the follow up meeting in August was an interesting experience with lots of stakeholders gathered to voice their opinions. The culmination of all this work resulted in the launch yesterday by Minister Halligan of the first National Space Strategy for Ireland 2019 - 2025. Plenty of food for thought and the section on upskilling in particular caught my eye following a recent SFI Discovery submission.

Drone Industry Day - Maynooth University

Thanks to Tim and the team for a very interesting day of talks on North Campus. Beginning with an update on the rapidly approaching European Drone Regs - and followed by speakers discussing things ranging from Manna (the best name ever for a drone food delivery company) to ways to stop wifi, radio or GPS piloted rogue drones - i got plenty of food for thought. One of the tools shown on the video was a giant electromagnetic gun that can fry a drones circuit-board from quite a distance.. Advances in UTM are one to watch and one of the early speakers told us that the first apartment (i can't remember if its an apartment or a block of apartments) built in London with its own drone delivery pad is opening tomorrow. The times they are a-changing...

New Drones @ Department of Geography

Took delivery of two drones this morning.

One is a Parrott Bluegrass - a rugged, out of the box rotary drone with a forward facing oblique RGB camera and a nadir looking Parrott Sequioa. A very nice piece of kit, eliminates many of the issues I spoke about before with bespoke integration mounts for sensors on the DJI series.

The other is a  fixed wing - covers a much wider area and has RGB capability via a canon camera.

Looking forward to testing these two out - need to renew my SOP and license and then up, up and away.....