Instantaneous Infrastructure Monitoring by Earth Observation

Modern globalised societies are highly dependent on functioning infrastructures. Typical examples are transport infrastructures such as airports, ports, roads and railway lines, but also pipelines, data cables and the power grid. Due to political destabilisation around the world and an increasing frequency of natural disasters caused by climate change, the risk of disruption to these critical infrastructures has grown in recent years.

To restore the functionality of critical systems promptly after an incident, it is essential to quickly gain an overview of the situation.

IIMEO (Instantaneous Infrastructure Monitoring by Earth Observation) works towards enabling real-time monitoring of critical infrastructures using a constellation of small satellites flying in low Earth orbit (LEO). Specifically, an innovative payload of multiple cameras and SAR is developed, whose data is fused and processed directly aboard the acquisition platform to achieve topicality. Additionally, the payload will be integrated into an end-to-end demonstrator for railway track monitoring and will be tested by the national railway infrastructure asset management company of Serbia, Serbian Railway Infrastructure. To reduce the risk, the demonstrator uses an aircraft instead of a satellite constellation, but it is designed to minimise the cost of replacing the aircraft with real satellites, which would be the follow-up project. IIMEO is funded by the European Union as an innovation action under the Horizon Europe programme.