A couple of months back, I reached out to you with our key product updates from the first half of 2023. I'd planned to provide the next update at the end of the year. But we've been shipping some great things lately and figured, why wait? 🙂
From a greatly improved ordering experience to new storage with CNAM capabilities, our newest features tackle the biggest problems in your geospatial project workflow. The end goal? To give you consistent, easy, and fast access to Earth observation data from the world’s top providers. Let’s dive in.
1. Ordering 🛰️
Scene delivery monitoring
Now there’s an easier way to stay on top of complex tasking orders. When a new asset is delivered to storage, the footprint of the acquired scenes is automatically displayed over the order AOI. You can go to the tasking order overview and click on a specific order to get this information. For complex orders with multiple AOIs, now you get a quick overview of the acquired scenes, without exchanging tedious emails.
Easier geometry management
Handling complex geometries while placing orders takes a lot of time and effort. We’re solving this pain point with our new geometry management tool. No more redrawing or re-uploading polygons–all of your AOIs can be saved and retrieved whenever you need them. This first version keeps the functionality simple: you can create, store, and re-use AOIs. Rest assured that we’re adding more functionality to this feature, and you can expect more updates soon.
New collection integrations
It’s business as usual when it comes to new integrations–we continue to enrich our platform with more diverse collections. In the last edition, I communicated the launch of ultra high resolution aerial imagery from Vexcel on the UP42 platform. This was a major hit with our customers, and it’s become one of our fastest-adopted integrations. Here are the other collections we’ve integrated recently:
Catalog:
- Beijing-3A archive data from 21AT
Tasking:
- KOMPSAT-3, KOMPSAT-3A, and KOMPSAT-5 from SIIS
- EROS-B and EROS-C from ImageSat
Filtering for tasking orders
This is a small but often-requested feature by our customers. When you have a long list of orders, it can be a pain to narrow down on a specific one within the tasking dashboard. To solve this, we’ve introduced a new capability that lets you filter by order name and order tag.
2. Data management 🧑💻
We've introduced a cloud-native asset model (CNAM) for assets in UP42 storage. Regardless of provider or delivery format, we’ll transform UP42 assets into individual geospatial features available for immediate download. Each file will be mapped as a STAC asset under a STAC item, with the original delivery accessible under the STAC collection. CNAM will also convert all raster data into cloud optimized GeoTIFFs or COGs for short, and all vector masks into GeoJSONs to enable easier integrations.
Within a short period, this has become one of our most popular features among UP42 customers. If you would like to know more about using CNAM for data management, check out our in-depth blog.
3. Sample data for discovery 💡
Projects in our industry often have lengthy discovery and exploration phases. There are a bunch of different variables that you want to test out and account for before spending your budget on ordering satellite imagery. We totally understand this requirement, so we’ve made sample data available for free, allowing you to explore our offerings before making purchases. Here’s the full list of providers from whom you can order sample data on UP42:
- Airbus
- Vexcel
- BlackSky
- Hexagon
- Intermap
- 21AT
- Axelspace
4. Platform experience 🔍
And, of course, we’re constantly improving our platform user experience. With order tags in the credit history page, you can easily track relevant tags and associate them with individual transactions and their credits. This lets you stay on top of the credits spent on a particular project, and create cost reports for internal and external stakeholders. We’ve also updated our Python SDK with a new function for downloading STAC assets, and updated documentation and tutorials.
Thank you for reading! We are committed to making geospatial data more accessible than ever before. Stay tuned for upcoming features and enhancements that will further improve the way you access and manage data on the UP42 platform.
