Partner News: University of Edinburgh Space Project to Receive a Portion of £7m Government Funding

Trailblazing technology that will help tackle climate change and predict global disasters using satellites is receiving new funding from the UK Space Agency.

Eleven UK organisations have been awarded a share of just under £7 million of government funding to put into action the latest advances in space innovation. The majority of the projects focus on climate change or environmental management, with others designed to secure our telecommunication systems and protect digital infrastructure against cyber- attacks.

We are delighted to announce that a project conducted by The University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences is one of the 11 receiving funding.

Their project: Global Lidar Altimetry MISsion: GLAMIS has been awarded roughly £300,000.

GLAMIS will bring together expertise from Scotland’s growing space and photonics sectors to pioneer a new approach to space-borne lidar; a system capable of mapping global topography and above-ground structure and change detection. This phase will focus on increasing coverage through increasing laser wavelength stability and signal processing.

Other projects receiving the cash boost include Global Satellite Vu Ltd, which will build a compact high-resolution infrared camera for satellites to measure thermal emissions from our homes, schools and places of work, helping to improve energy efficiency. The Open University in Milton Keynes will develop the mission concept for “TreeView”, a forestry and management tool that will support a nature-based solution to tackling climate change by monitoring the health of trees from space.

The funding comes from the UK Space Agency's National Space Innovation Programme (NSIP) and has been announced today (9th November 2021) as the UK hosts the COP 26 climate talks in Glasgow. Space is playing an essential role in the fight against climate change, with satellites collecting half of the 56 types of data we need to measure and understand climate change.

Satellites in space are helping us solve some of the most significant challenges we face, from climate change to cyber attacks, and through the National Space Strategy we are putting the UK at the forefront of unleashing these innovations.

Whether it's monitoring greenhouse gas emissions or supporting increased tree planting, this new funding will take game-changing ideas from the UK space sector and our brilliant scientists, and turn them into reality