ESA HMA/CoMu

The "Heterogeneous Mission Accessibility" (HMA) project is lead by the European Space Agency and its main objective is to allow seamless access to data from multiple earth observation missions. The agency thus started the definition of service interfaces to address interoperability requirements arising from the multitude of data formats, protocols, security policies, architectures and systems used in different countries. Harmonised access is seeked in the domains of cataloguing, ordering, programming, planning, and archive access.

The "Constellations and Multi-Use" (CoMu) project is a subset of HMA and focuses on the programming aspects especially in a multi-mission context. It addresses the problem of tasking/programming several satellites from one or more constellations in a common way so that mediation services can be introduced to handle user requests in smarter and more efficient ways. The Spotimage company based in Toulouse, France, is involved in this part of the project for which a "Sensor Planning Service" was developped to demonstrate the applicability of this Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard to the problem.

Sensia Software is tasked to provide documents written in the SensorML language (another OGC standard) that describe capabilities of the various instruments of interest to the project. These documents are used in conjunction with the Spotimage SPS do give information to the client (a user or another service) who can in turn simulate the satellite spatio-temporal coverage and estimate if their needs can be met. The SPS service itself can compute a much more accurate feasability study taking more parameters into account, such as the satellite programming schedule and current meteorological data. Instruments covered by this project include radar sensors such as TerrarSarX, Radarsat2, ERS or ASAR, optical sensors such as SPOT, Pléiades and Formosat and scientific instruments such as Jason and Metop.