Space: Iride 400 satellite data brought to market for public administration and businesses

Among the unexpected legacies of the NRRP is a market for information gathered by satellites. The Italian Iride Earth observation constellation, funded with nearly €1.1 billion from the Recovery and Resilience Plan and the Complementary National Fund, has grown to comprise 31 satellites in orbit and, above all, has entered a completely new phase. The images captured by the satellites are converted into data, which is then processed and transformed into geospatial services and products that, since 1 July, have been gradually made available to public authorities and private sector organisations.

This is the marketplace launched by the ASI (Italian Space Agency), an initiative which, once fully operational, is set to bring over 400 geospatial products to market: thematic maps, environmental indicators, time series and reports that can be used across a wide range of fields and economic sectors, from civil protection to environmental monitoring, from security to the preservation of cultural heritage and international cooperation.

The products stem from geospatial service value chains organised into eight domains – marine and coastal monitoring; air quality; ground movement; land use and land cover; hydrometeorology and climate; water resource management; emergencies; security – and there could be hundreds of application scenarios. Some examples: in logistics, the monitoring of flows at ports, hubs and open-air storage facilities; in agriculture, precision farming techniques and the assessment of water use, the application of fertilisers, or the examination of vegetation potentially affected by pests; in infrastructure: predictive maintenance based on millimetre-precise surveys of ground subsidence; in the energy sector: the management of distribution networks or the analysis of soil stability and ground gradient to identify suitable sites for photovoltaic installations; in emergency management, the high-precision delineation of the areas affected by a fire or a flood; in insurance, the analysis of the condition of buildings for the purposes of risk assessment.

The launch of the marketplace effectively marked the start of the transfer of the Iride system from the European Space Agency (ESA) to ASI, which owns the national infrastructure. Silvia Natalucci, head of the Earth Observation Mission Management sector within ASI’s Technology and Engineering Directorate, explains the key elements and development stages of the project. “In the first phase, we began with data derived from eight of the 31 satellites already in orbit. We plan to extend the scope to the remaining 23 satellites by the end of the year and, subject to their launch, to all 68 satellites planned for the constellation by 2028.” Phase 1 is open – free of charge – exclusively to Italian public administrations, including the Civil Protection Agency, the Ministry of Defence, research bodies and universities. At a later stage, the marketplace will be extended – on a fee-paying basis – to SMEs, start-ups and industries, which will be able to make use of the pre-processed datasets for business and commercial strategies; it will also be accessible to software houses, which will be able to develop specific applications. Public administrations in other countries will also be able to access the datasets, either for a fee or free of charge if bilateral agreements are concluded. The mixed free-pay model should, in future, ensure the economic sustainability of the infrastructure alongside a share of public funding.

“This initiative,” comments Silvia Natalucci, “should be seen in the context of the rapid growth of the international market for geospatial data and services, which, according to Euroconsult, is set to rise from 5 billion euros in 2024 to at least 7 billion by 2030. The real added value of Iride, which sets it apart from other Earth observation missions, is its ability to provide end-users not only with traditional satellite data at various levels of processing, but also with geospatial products that deliver ready-to-use information.” Essentially, the data is collected, integrated with information from ground-based sensors and, in some cases, mathematical models, and processed through a service value chain to produce outputs that can be used directly by public authorities and businesses. Ready-to-use information, already ‘monetisable’ for a business entity, and with a coverage frequency that could reach a daily basis. The portfolio of services, adds Natalucci, “includes ‘digital twins’ to simulate scenarios and make forecasts underpinning interventions and strategies for climate management, air quality and the coastal environment, as well as toolkits to extract value from the data through further processing”.