The Andy Thomas Space Foundation for the first time have partnered with Netherlands based company, cosine to provide a bilateral scholarship opportunity for Australian based PhD students and early career researchers.
The Foundation has also announced the winner of the Remote sensing project awards, or more commonly known as the 2022 Pluto award, as Kathiravan Thangavel, a PhD student and SmartSat CRC researcher based at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).
Kathiravan’s research proposal, titled: ‘Hyperspectral data processing in wildfire detection and rescue operations using Artificial Intelligence’, offered a challenging and novel approach to contribute to an area of high impact across the globe.
The Foundation says Kathiravan’s research will contribute heavily to an Australian Space Agency priority area, being Earth Observation technologies for on earth applications. A market that according to Industry Growth Insite association, is expected to grow from USD 9.5 billion in 2018 to USD 21.8 billion by 2030.
This market growth can be attributed to the increasing demand for earth observation data and value-added services (VAS) across different applications, including agriculture, defence, Disaster Management, and energy alongside increased investments in earth observation infrastructure by governments and private organisations.
The ATSF and Kathiravan had the opportunity to meet with and discuss the upcoming research project in the great company of the team at cosine. Kathiravan will have the opportunity to visit cosine, an organisation based in the Netherlands and engage with local industry, as part of his AUD $15,000 award.
Kathiravan has said of the award that ‘it is my profound privilege to have been chosen as the winner of the Andy Thomas Space Foundation’s cosine Remote Sensing 2022 Award… through this experience, I am eager to continue learning, develop myself and start making a contribution to the aerospace sector.”
ATSF CEO Nicola Sasanelli shared his thoughts on the exciting international opportunity saying, ‘We feel a great sense of pride in commencing our collaborations with international organisations, such as cosine, which intends to invest in the Australian space ecosystem through not only industry presence but education opportunities for emerging talent. Our Foundation considers itself very lucky to be involved in Australian space Education and to offer our 2022 Fund programs, looking for innovative ideas from researchers, whilst exploring new leaders in the field of optical and in-situ measurement systems for space applications.”
Marco Esposito, managing director of cosine Remote Sensing, further shared his hopes and thoughts for the impactful outcomes of this project stating, ‘’We are glad to have Kathivaran onboard supporting the development of such high impact solution to mitigate the wildfire issue that increasingly threatens the world due to the expansion of global drylands under a warming climate. The solution will exploit different HyperScout capabilities and will be of great use also over Australia within the Kanyini mission.”
