The European Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, announced the forthcoming presentation of a roadmap to prepare the future of the Copernicus Earth observation programme, on Wednesday 16 February at a conference dedicated to Europe’s flagship programme on the sidelines of the Space Summit (see EUROPE 12892/19).
The Commissioner announced the “forthcoming” presentation of a roadmap to make his services’ ambitions for the decade and beyond more concrete and operational, in close cooperation with the Member States and the European Space Agency (ESA).
During his speech, the Commissioner acknowledged that the programme was facing major challenges and that it needed to reinvent itself to meet the challenges of tomorrow. According to him, the huge amounts of data generated daily by Copernicus remain underused. As a result, the programme should become more than a space constellation: a digital infrastructure.
He explained, for example, that the future generation of Copernicus could be equipped with infrastructure to process information automatically in orbit, a system that presupposes the use of high-performance semiconductors resistant to electromagnetic interference, he said. These satellites should also be “reprogrammable”, according to him, in order to respond to demands that change over time. As for the ground segment, the Commissioner believes that data processing and breakdown systems based on artificial intelligence should be developed.
Furthermore, Mr Breton confirmed his willingness to make Copernicus a key instrument for implementing the European ‘Green Deal’, in particular for monitoring CO2 emissions, in connection with the future COP28 in 2023. On this subject, he assured that funding would be secured and that the new mission would be deployed by 2026, despite certain constraints - a reference to the budget deficit linked to Brexit (see EUROPE 12885/19). He called for the integration of quantum technologies for a quantum gravimetry space mission before 2030.
In addition, Mr Breton intends to launch a reflection to create a government service to accompany security missions, which would mean reviewing the governance of the programme. Finally, it intends to call on the European ‘New Space’.
For his part, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said that his institution would increasingly call on the private sector. The industry sector, on the other hand, insisted on stable institutional funding and access to data. The question of data certification was also raised. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)