GMV leads development of ESA COVID-19 Space Hunting Platform

GMV will search using artificial intelligence for any correlations between COVID-19 spread and environmental parameters.

Image: ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched an internal initiative to cull ideas for supporting its member states in the study and analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under this initiative, an idea from the Galileo Navigation Science Office has been selected.

The COVID-19 Space Hunting Platform is designed to facilitate access to and processing of existing COVID-19 databases for epidemiological studies, topping them up with data from ESA’s Earth observation satellites.

The project will use artificial intelligence to look for correlations between COVID-19 spread and environmental parameters, such as humidity and temperature.

The aim is to help researchers generate products and statistics that might be useful for decision-making purposes in terms of protection measures and lockdown, while also vetting the efficiency of the measures taken.

Development of the COVID-19 Space Hunting Platform will be primed by the technology multinational GMV. The Universidad Politécnica de Valencia will also be taking part, with support for processing, data analysis and interaction with diverse epidemiological research groups. The university has defined a mathematical COVID-19 transmission model and has been publishing periodical updates and forecasts of its trend in Spain.

In the medium term, the COVID-19 Space Hunting Platform could help in setting up a collaborative COVID-19 website for scientists to analyze existing data more efficiently, benefiting also from ESA’s data-processing software packages.

The GSSC team will lead the program. (Photo: ESA)

The project will be carried out around the GNSS Science Support Centre (GSSC) platform, which hosts and indexes COVID-19 data. The three-month process will analyze public COVID-19 data and make this information available to the science community. This will lead to a first version with basic pandemic-propagation algorithms, updated thereafter to ensure the information is always precise and up to date.