The Earth as a planet

The Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society’s Annual Conference provides an excellent opportunity for members to meet and present their work on any aspect of remote sensing or photogrammetry. Each year, however, a special theme is chosen as a focus for the conference and, for RSPSoc2017, the topic chosen was ‘The Earth as a Planet’. RSPSoc2017 was held in the Royal School of Mines, Department of Earth Science & Engineering, at Imperial College London from 5 to 8 September 2017.

The conference was well attended, with delegates travelling from 18 countries outside the UK. The Satellite Applications Catapult & UK Space Agency ran their annual Space Placements in Industry (SPIN) Showcase on Wednesday 6th Sept, in parallel with the main conference, and it was attended by students and corporate internship hosts. A series of poster presentations and talks ran throughout the day, and the event finished with a visit to the 3D visualisation suite at Imperial College London where ‘SPINterns’ were treated to a virtual field trip on the surface of Mars, led by Prof Sanjeev Gupta.

The talks in the main conference sessions were of a very high standard, and there were two excellent keynote talks from Mike James (Lancaster University) on the state-of-the art in structure-from-motion, and by Kathie Bowden, on the future direction of EO in the UK.

In addition to sessions on land cover, risk & hazards, operation and validation (commercial issues), new sensors, geomorphology, heritage & archaeology, spatial and spectral sciences, there were double sessions each on InSAR and on planetary science. Of the ten papers in the planetary science sessions, eight were dedicated to Mars and the remaining two covered developments in Venus geoscience. The planetary papers included discussions of:

• Hyperspectral characterisation of the Mars South Polar Residual Cap using the CRISM on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

• Image-chain simulation and performance of ExoMars rover PanCam wide-angle cameras

• Quantifying active surface processes on Mars with sub-pixel image co-registration and correlation

• Anatomy of an ancient aeolian sandstone on Mars: the Stimson formation in Gale crater

• Mars in 3D – 3D geological analysis and terrestrial validation of rover derived stereo-imagery.

• Inter-comparison of methods for extracting subsurface layers from the SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Radargrams over the Martian poles

• The status of planet-wide Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) DTM generation using a fully automated multi-resolution DTM processing chain (CASP-GO)

• Autocoregistration and orthorectification of CTX Images over the South Pole of Mars.

• Radar data from Venus and Earth: Lessons in comparative planetology for EnVision

• Seeking out volcanism on Venus using IR and UV remote sensing

The two planetary sessions demonstrated the lively and growing UK interest in planetary remote sensing. Details of the projects in hand can be found on the websites of the Earth Science & Engineering Department of Imperial College London, the EnVision Venus mission, the Mullard Space Science Laboratory of University College, Peter Grindrod, and the Department of Atmosopheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, Oxford University.

Turning to the papers in this special issue there are four planetary papers, one on lunar geomorpholology (Micheal and Vani 2018), two are concerned with the interesting idea of setting up an Earth observing station on the surface of the Moon (Ye et al. 2018; Duan, Huang, and Nie 2018) and the fourth paper is concerned with testing a robotic vehicle for exploring other planets (Hobbs, Paull, and Clarke 2018). The general conference-related papers dealing with marine applications of remote sensing are related to near sea surface winds (Nekrasov et al. 2018), the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Varotsos, Cracknell, and Efstathiou 2018) and the Larsen iceberg (Parmiggiani et al. 2018). As is usual the majority of applications are land-based, covering the Kruger national park (South Africa) (Munyati 2018), degraded land and dust erodibility (Kimura 2018), oil palm mapping (Cheng et al. 2018), desert heat fluxes in Tibet (Ma, Wang, and Han 2018) and methane emissions from wetlands (Bansal et al. 2018). Finally, there are two papers on the atmosphere discussing the transport of carbon monoxide (Palve, Nemade, and Ghude 2018) and weak backscattering signals from the atmosphere (Yegorov, Potapova, and Sanotskaya 2018) and two on image analysis involving deep learning (Zhang et al. 2018) and object based classification (Kavzoglu and Tonbul 2018).

We conclude by commenting that the importance of planetary science, in its broadest sense, is growing fast, as is our need to really understand the Earth as a system. To fully comprehend what makes Earth so special and what might happen to it in the future, there are important lessons to be learned from looking at our Solar System neighbours, especially if we are to understand the potential habitability of exoplanets. Our technological capabilities and expertise in Earth Observation will become ever more essential in detecting, monitoring, measuring and interpreting processes on other planets. We should all perhaps begin to think of ourselves as planetary scientists.