308 pointsby saubeidl6 hours ago8 comments
  • cyclotron3k3 hours ago
    Would the data from this satellite be freely available to the public? I couldn't see anything obvious
    • beklein3 hours ago
      As far as I can tell, they say: "Mission control and data distribution are managed by EUMETSAT." They have published their own blog post here: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...

      There they say that: "Observations made by MTG-S1 will feed into data products that support national weather services …". So I guess there will be no simple, publicly available REST API or so... but if anybody finds anything, let us know here :)

      • jcattle3 hours ago
        • jahller3 hours ago
          nice find. so you need a client_id to access the API
      • davedx2 hours ago
        Most weather data isn't generally available by easy to query REST API's (at least not at the original sources). One side project I had I wanted to use NOMADs data, and it was quite a grind downloading and processing the raw datasets into something usable at an application level (or viable to expose via an API).
    • pastage3 hours ago
      As most EU projects yes. There was test data released last year to get you started.

      https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/getting-star...

      • SirHumphrey3 hours ago
        Well, at least in my experience with EU projects, they tend to be much more restrictive with data sharing than equivalent US institutions: e.g. a lot of paid EUMET data has publicly available NOAA equivalents - though usually of worse quality.
        • pastage2 hours ago
          Yes! That government agencies data is PD is a nice feature of US law, we should implement that in EU.
        • IshKebab2 hours ago
          Not sure why you're being down-voted. US weather models are free. EU models are not.
          • tcumulus2 hours ago
            Depends on which model. Only really the ECMWF weather model is not fully free. The German, French, Dutch, ... models are all free (regional and global models). Of course, these global models are generally less accurate than ECMWF, still ECMWF has a lot of free data available too. US models are also freely available, and quite easy to work with (as opposed to some European ones).
    • jcattle3 hours ago
      Yes, it will be freely available to the public
    • bitschubser_3 hours ago
      I guess you will be able to access the data with copernicus (usually thy even provide raw L0 data)
    • plantain2 hours ago
      Definitely not in anything like realtime, maybe an archive. There's a licence fee of 8000EUR/yr to access real-time EUMETSAT data. Welcome to Europe, where you pay for everything twice.
      • anfogoatan hour ago
        Hah! I don't believe this for a second. No, you need the 8k, a business entity (at the very least), five different licenses of some sort, and then some form of accreditation.
  • aleciffo5 hours ago
    Does anyone know what are we talking about in practice in terms of weather forecast prediction improvement? Like MAE/RMSE
    • lauri_jo3 hours ago
      This data is from the third generation of Meteosats, which are the European meteorological satellites. A lot like GOES in the north-America. The main improvement is really significant improvement in resolution. The resolution is, depending on the channel, 9 times better than in the second generation. The main improvement in forecasting comes due to better information in the initial condition of the numerical weather prediction, but it is hard to quantify in advance. I'd be surprised if MAE, over the 15 days the prediction spans, would improve more than 0.1 C, if we talk about the raw prediction. There are plenty of things that this data is used for, but I would say that improved nowcast of cloud coverage, and energy production related parameters are likely to benefit most from the improvement in resolution.
      • mjanx1233 hours ago
        I use windy.com for its 'compare models', the models can differ by ~2C sometimes
    • peyton4 hours ago
      I was curious but it’s surprisingly hard to find info. These guys [1] are pretty stoked about “nowcasting”—which seems to be on sub-10-minute timescales to issue local severe weather warnings and such. It appears current sounders don’t scan as often.

      This project ppt from 2011 [2] references different requirements for different areas/teams and shows the instrument spits out readings at 150 Mbit/s, which seems like a good clip. Overall it sounds like a lot of local knowledge is involved in turning this output into forecasts. Maybe there’s not a precise answer to your question.

      Somebody else must know more.

      [1]: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/think-global-act-local

      [2]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Donny-Aminou/publicatio...

    • atoav4 hours ago
      This is an improvement as it provides better data and has nothing to do with the models that are used in a separate step to forcast anything. But that is said in the article as well, with the satellite being the first hyperspectral view on Europe and North Africa.

      I am not sure what to make if your question.

      • hobofan3 hours ago
        > I am not sure what to make if your question.

        They are asking for a quantification of improvement. "better" predictions could range from "only experts notice" to "the daily/7 day weather is now noticeably more accurate for all citizens of Europe".

      • KeplerBoy4 hours ago
        Ultimately better data will lead to and enable better models and forecasts, but I'm sure it's not super easy to put a number to that.
  • eypandabear3 hours ago
    Also check out the EUMETSAT site if you want more information on how the data is used:

    https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...

  • hubraumhugo4 hours ago
    I recently met a European space startup founder and was surprised to learn how much space innovation is happening in Europe with ESA. Europe wants to become less depended on SpaceX and NASA, and is heavily investing there. More funding + strong aerospace programs at universities like TU Munich has led to companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor), which is great to see.
    • TrackerFF4 hours ago
      I work in the domain, and it is true that many of the startups will almost entirely use free data, like from the sentinel satellites via ESA. It really lowers the barriers to entry, if you have a nice idea.

      EDIT:

      We actually work close with one startup that sprung out from academia. The founders wrote their masters thesis on object detection and pattern recognition using sentinel imaging. They had basically one product: to detect certain objects. After a couple of years they had gotten a handful of customers (basically they'd receive coordinates to some are of interest, and then tasked with trying to detect something), which afforded them to purchase commercial data (from other types of sensors) for building more robust systems. This in turn grew their customer bas, and they started adding products.

      Then they were acquired by one of the largest private space companies.

      But, in any case, it all started with access to free data. Would they have started a company like this, if they hadn't had access to the data from ESA? Who knows, but it made it all much easier. And they were able to completely bootstrap the company.

    • joeig4 hours ago
      If you are ever in Munich and want to find out more, be sure to visit the ESO Supernova[0].

      [0] https://supernova.eso.org/

      • jahller3 hours ago
        definitely worth a visit. loved the exhibition about the Atacama desert telescopes. especially great for kids.
    • KellyCriterion4 hours ago
      There are even Hackathons from ESA:

      "Act in Space"

      https://actinspace.org/

      I worked at one of the hosts of one these events years ago - very intersting people there!

      • 3D304974204 hours ago
        Very cool!

        Small odd thing, but that's the first tracking warning modal I've seen that says they don't actually use tracking. And I can decline the no tracking? Kinda funny.

    • simgt4 hours ago
      maiaspace (https://www.maia-space.com/) also intends to compete with SpaceX and is an Ariane spin-off, they're meant to do their first launch this year and start putting satellites in LEO in 27
      • dagi3d4 hours ago
        There is also a Spanish company which according to them, they were the first private European company to reach space with their rocket: https://www.pldspace.com/en/
      • panick21_an hour ago
        There were once about 300 small rocket companies. About 250 of them are dead by by now.

        The Europeans were late to the game, and their companies got some late investment.

        Out of those 300 companies basically 0 of them have actually made money with rockets. Companies like RocketLab pivoted to in-space stuff and that's where they actually make money.

        Pretty much every single small rocket company has lost money with small rockets and pivots to larger rockets where there is more demand because of constellations. But in Europe, that will be near impossible because of the Ariane monopoly.

        And closing the case on reuse for small rockets is even more difficult.

        I really think calling companies that have barley done a test-launch 'spacex competitors' is a silly. At best its a luxury competitor to SpaceX ride-share launches.

    • riffraff2 hours ago
      there's a pretty great blog following european space news

      https://europeanspaceflight.com/

      A lot has been happening in recent years with launchers once ESA broke the Ariane "chokehold".

      • panick21_an hour ago
        Except of course the Ariane chockhold never existed for small rockets. Because Vega exists. And for large rockets the "chokehold" very much continues to exist and shows absolutely zero evidence of going away in the next decade.

        So far the support for these small launchers has been mostly for new missions and nowhere near in the volume to support even two of these small launch companies. Specially if Vega also survives as a rocket.

        Europe simply does not produce enough launches for these companies. And all of them will suffer from very low launch rates and non will be able to seriously compete for international payloads.

    • _fizz_buzz_3 hours ago
      The Trump administration is probably helping quite a bit on two fronts here:

      - A very strong political will to decouple strategic industries from the US

      - The US is making it a lot harder to work there. So top talent stays in Europe.

    • saubeidl4 hours ago
      Europe is behind in launchers, but the stuff they send up is top-notch.

      Euclid, the latest ESA telescope is particularly mind-blowing, capturing a third of the visible sky in incredible detail.

      Check out this update video, it's insane how they can zoom in on stuff: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIpvfQ

    • panick21_2 hours ago
      Can you show some actual evidence of that? Because evidence actually shows that commercial growth in the US outpaces Europe by a gigantic degree. The traditional European companies like Airbus has made lots of loses. European companies are not even competing in the LEO race to any serious degree.

      Their 'compete with SpaceX' Ariane 6 rocket has been an unmitigated disaster. And in order to 'compete with SpaceX' they are giving billions in subsidies to Amazon instead, I guess that is better. And its exactly what they didn't want to do when they designed the Ariane 6 program in the first place.

      > companies like ISAR Aerospace (SpaceX competitor)

      If anything they are a far, far, far inferior competitor of RocketLab. SpaceX isn't even in the same universe as ISAR.

      The simple fact is, small rocket companies are not viable, and pretty much all of them are not profitable and/or go bust. RocketLab itself basically never made money from rockets, the pivoted mostly to in-space stuff.

      Maybe one of the small European rocket companies can survive if it gets enough support from ESA, but then moving on to anything beyond that is going to be hard.

      > NASA, and is heavily investing there

      If we look at ESA and EU space budget, we can see that it goes up a bit, but nowhere near close to anything in the US.

      So yes, there is some energy in the European space sector, but its very easy to overestimate, and specially if you look at it compared to the US.

    • usrusr2 hours ago
      At this point, calling ISAR a competitor to SpaceX feels a bit like calling Pringles a competitor to TSMC, but it's certainly good to see some movement happening.
  • 3 hours ago
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  • haritha-j3 hours ago
    I hate to worry everyone, but I think there might be some triangular chunks missing off the corners of our planet, someone should probably look into this.

    (Specifically around 2, 5, and 10 o clock on the orientation of the images provided)

  • ibad667772 hours ago
    hh
  • ibad667772 hours ago
    hi