Advanced space telescope, gpu‑based on‑board processing hardware & ai processing for climate-change mitigation eo services

Earth Observation (EO) can positively impact policies, decisions and interventions in a range of applications, including in natural disasters (e.g. floods and wildfires), precision agriculture (e.g. thanks to the monitoring of vegetation heat stress), mitigation of environmental impact (e.g. urban heat islands and heat loss at the building level). Mitigation supported by EO could reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by more than 2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) annually, equating to 3.8% of the global annual GHG emissions today. Unlocking this full climate-change mitigation potential entails: Navigating a ‘Goldilocks Problem’ of strict trade-offs among field of view, image resolution, revisit frequency, and payload mass/size and overcoming a number of limitations that currently delay the delivery of time-critical data to users. The THEOSCOPE project addresses existing EO limitations through a game-changing solution that will transform the economics of EO imagery, based on a set of tightly integrated innovations. THEOSCOPE redefines Thermal infra-red (TIR) imaging thanks to a compact and affordable TIR telescope, on‑board intelligence AI data filtering and processing empowered by an innovative GPU based computing system, connectivity, and platform design thanks to a modular and in‑orbit serviceable platform. Co-design of use cases with stakeholders will ensure that the mission’s technological advances are translated into tangible societal impact across 3 key application domains, including monitoring urban heat islands and heat loss at the building level, vegetation heat stress in agriculture, and enhancing wildfire detection and response. The overall goal is to reach flight acceptance of the overall system by the end of the project (TRL 8) so that the final system will be ready for flight just after the project end.