Australia is in a privileged geographical position when it comes to Earth Observing space missions: our land is representative of almost all climate zones in the planet, terrestrial and aquatic systems and covers most biome types.

Increasingly, multiple stakeholders – including industry, government, defence, academia and NGOs – rely on EO data for their mapping, monitoring, and modelling activities across several application areas. For EO data and products to become widely used and adopted, providing the right level of “trust” is critical, especially on key sectors where benefits of EO could be invaluable such as agriculture, mining, emergency services, and natural resources in aquatic and terrestrial environments. This trust comes from understanding the explicit link between the satellite derived information and sampled ground measurements (calibration) as well as knowing its level of accuracy (validation).

The project aims to identify promising areas of research in the field of pre-operational testing of Earth Observation sensors (calibration), and algorithms and analytics (validation) for Earth Observation. It will concentrate on developing a prototype testbed for calibration and validation for commercial or research satellites.