"The Drone" - A Post for Halloween....

Its not often I have a geo-related 'Halloween' blogpost - but I came across this movie on Sky movies recently and could not believe my eyes...someone seems to have cast a standard DJI Drone as 'the murderer' in a recent movie. It has everything to shock and horrify a licensed drone pilot - unsafe flying practices, dangerous maneuvers in shared airspace, flying indoors, GDPR violations - it even looks like it weaponises poor battery charging procedures. The thing that will push me over the edge is if they don't back up their data at the end...horrific.

ICESAT 2 and Bathymetry

IceSAT 2 was in the news recently - people have been using it to map the seabed/water depths. This is good news - the availability of recently captured calibration datasets (no matter how sparse) is a major impediment to roll-out of satellite derived bathymetry, as the seabed changes so much over time in places and the calibration data should ideally be captured close to the time the image was captured at. Laser wavelength is in the green portion of the spectrum - so good for penetrating water - wonder where they get the surface from? Weaker returns maybe? Tide gauge nearby?

I had a look to see what sort of coverage we had for coastal regions in Ireland and was directed to the excellent openaltimetry website. Looks like we have one scanline running through Tralee bay, another through Dublin bay - both sites we have published papers for but used older calibration data.

If you look closely in the image above - you can see there are points to the left and right of the green scanline - I dont know enough about the system yet to know is the profile spacing actually less (p.s. less is better) than that image suggests, or is that something to do with image footprint (unlikely as it is only 17m according to the website). You can use openaltimetry.org to have a quick look at profiles anywhere in Ireland - wonder would it have picked up the change over the National Ploughing Championships...

Anyway - looking forward to exploring this data in more detail.


Update: Here's my answer - 6 beams organised in 3 pairs, with a weak/strong combination. Probably also answers the water surface question too..

EARSC Market Report

The annual EARSC report is out, summarizing the European Space Industry and Market in 2019. Always an interesting read - I was please to see Ireland moving up the '"Number of Companies" ranking, ahead of number of larger countries, so a great sign that things are moving in the right direction. We will see how the recent launch of the national space strategy effects this.

It certainly should effect it positively, as only yesterday Minister Halligan was in the news announcing some success stories in Irish industry and also a new €500,000 fund to help private industry collaborate with public bodies on space based projects. Very interesting to see ESA will also be partnered with Maynooth University in organizing this fund, so more good news there.

I can certainly see plenty of opportunities for collaborations and know multiple public bodies looking for expertise, the problem is finding the right partners in private industry.

ERC - again....

Academia is a funny old fish - three years ago I was tapping away at the weekend on an ERC project proposal, only to be surprised by an early arrival. Three years later at that 'early arrivals' 3rd birthday party I'm busy revising that proposal for resubmission. Lots changed in those three years, mostly my knowledge of Thomas the Tank Engine and Dinosaurs.

Update: ok - submitted. Now to deal with the massive backlog that has accumulated!