What is Earth Observation?
Earth Observation (EO) encompasses all activities of sensing and recording information about Earth's surface, atmosphere, and oceans from satellite or airborne platforms. EO satellites carry a range of sensor types optimised for different applications: optical cameras for visible-light imagery, synthetic aperture radars (SAR) for all-weather imaging, multispectral sensors for vegetation and agricultural analysis, thermal infrared for sea surface temperature and wildfire detection, and hyperspectral imagers for mineral mapping and environmental assessment.
Market and players
The global satellite EO market was valued at $3.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $6.6 billion by 2034 (5.9% CAGR). Maxar Technologies holds ~38% market share, followed by Airbus Defence and Space, Planet Labs, Spire Global, and ICEYE. The New Space wave has introduced daily-revisit constellations: Planet Labs operates 200+ Dove CubeSats capturing the entire Earth's landmass daily at 3–5 m resolution; ICEYE operates 30+ SAR microsatellites enabling revisit times under 1 hour for any point on Earth.
Key applications
Defence and intelligence: Persistent surveillance, change detection, order-of-battle assessment. Agriculture: Crop health monitoring via NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), yield prediction, irrigation management. Climate and environment: Deforestation tracking (Copernicus REDD+ programme), sea ice extent monitoring, flood mapping, wildfire perimeter detection. Maritime: Vessel detection and AIS correlation to combat illegal fishing, pollution monitoring. Infrastructure: Ground subsidence monitoring over pipelines and urban areas using InSAR (Interferometric SAR) at millimetre precision.
Open data: Copernicus
The EU's Copernicus programme operates the Sentinel satellite family (Sentinel-1 SAR, Sentinel-2 optical, Sentinel-3 ocean colour, Sentinel-5P atmospheric) and provides free, open data to any user. This has democratised EO access for governments, researchers, and NGOs globally and is a foundational dataset for the commercial EO analytics industry.