A Day in the Life of an ECO
3.22am on a dark winter’s morning and the incessant buzz of a mobile phone wakes Gary Crowley. He dresses quickly and jumps into his car, the cold air driving away any more thoughts of sleeping in.
Twenty minutes later he is at the DMC International Imaging (DMCii) offices in Guildford, Surrey, checking his computer and fax machine for any further messages. On the other side of the world a major earthquake is wreaking havoc through the small villages of Pakistan.
Gary is the Emergency on-Call Officer (ECO) for the International Charter: ‘Space & Major Disasters’. His is one of the most vital and responsive roles within the Charter organisation: analysing the request and scope of the disaster and co-ordinating the Charter’s satellite fleet to image the disaster zone in the quickest time possible. He is on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 1 week in 8, sharing the responsibility with other ECOs from across the Charter’s international member space agencies.
This morning, Gary’s large cup of coffee grows cold as he reads the information he has received from the Charter Authorised User in South Asia. He checks the news reports and starts work, calling and sending faxes to various space agencies all over the world to co-ordinate a satellite response to image the damaged area.
Gary is also the Operations Manager for DMCii, a small group of eleven people who co-ordinate a constellation of satellites, known as the DMC, for commercial remote sensing and disaster monitoring.
“Saving the world,” says Gary smiling, “I think we help. We definitely make a difference. The maps that are made from our images help the local government and relief organisations find out who is worst hit and how to reach them”.
Gary has two other members in his operations team, Kasia Kozan and Hanna Keller-Bland. Kasia is originally from Poland but her expertise landed her a job as a remote sensing specialist and as Campaign Manager for a European Space Agency project to image 38 countries in Europe in 2007. She achieved more than any other organisation in the world by providing the coverage in a single summer. “Given the weather in 2007, I think we surprised everyone by achieving such complete coverage, but that’s the advantage of the DMC satellites. We can image the whole of the UK in a single acquisition, so we only need one sunny day. Even in this country we can manage that!”
Hanna, meanwhile, is looking at satellite images of the Amazon rainforests. “This is the fourth year we have been asked to image the whole of the Amazon area to monitor deforestation,” she says. Hanna is now 23 years old and, having joined the group two years ago, has progressed from serving coffee to saving the rainforest in a single step. “My friends sometimes laugh about it, but they know we are doing something useful. The other night a friend called to ask me to go out but I had to say no because I had an earthquake in Japan and a hurricane in Texas to deal with!”
DMCii has only been in existence since 2004 but it has already made an impact, especially since the problems with NASA’s Landsat satellites. With the support of its parent company, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), it has a co-ordinated constellation of 6 satellites with two more being launched in 2010. Not many people realize that SSTL has built over 32 satellites for many of the larger space nations such as the US and China as well as for new space nations like Algeria and Nigeria. SSTL also built the first Galileo global navigation satellite Giove-A for the European Space Agency. Its low cost, quick build approach means that even private companies can now afford to have satellites built and launched.
By 9.00am the office is full. Dr Steve Mackin, DMCii’s Chief Scientist and one of the older members of the team, is looking at images of a Franco-Italian site in Antarctica, an area used to calibrate the satellite sensors used in the DMC Constellation. Steve points to the base, a set of black dots in a sea of white. “I’d love to go there one day. I’ve been told they have a very good wine cellar which would be a welcome thought after a day taking measurements in sub-zero temperatures.”
“Me first!” interrupts Dave Hodgson, DMCii’s Managing Director with a keen interest in environmental and disaster monitoring. Dave has spent a lot of time and effort building a business around the use of low cost micro-satellite systems. “The satellites only weigh just over 200lbs and are smaller than a washing machine in size, but working together in a constellation we can monitor the melting of glaciers, rainforest deforestation and the effects of natural disasters in any part of the world. We have even monitored illegal opium growing in Afghanistan.”
Not all the DMC satellites are owned by the UK. It’s a shining example of co-operation between the UK, Algeria, Nigeria, Turkey, China and Spain, with other possibilities springing up all over the globe.
“It makes sense,” says Paul Stephens, the Sales & Marketing Director responsible for contracting the extra capacity of the constellation when it’s not being used for disaster monitoring. “Each satellite is owned privately, but since the satellite only flies over its own country part of the time, we use the extra capacity for commercial applications. This means that we are able to provide disaster support at no cost to the taxpayer.”
Owen Hawkins leans back in his chair and produces his trademark impish grin, smiling at Gary Holmes’s latest quip. Owen and Gary H are the Business Development Managers for the team and are constantly looking for additional applications to develop. “Every day we have requests from companies and individuals to use our data, from boy scouts canoeing down the river Niger to precision farming companies wanted to reduce fertiliser use by monitoring vegetation crop yields.” DMCii has already been supporting precision crop monitoring in both Europe and the US and is looking to support a whole new range of applications and services.
“This is nice,” says Claudia Maxlow-Tomlinson, looking at the email she’s just been sent. Claudia handles the communications side of the International Charter and the DMC Consortium as well as the group in general. The mail is from the Deputy Director General of the Chinese National Committee for Disaster Reduction thanking DMCii and the International Charter for the help it gave during the Chinese earthquake at Wenchuan. Reading aloud she focuses on one paragraph,
“Support from your institute in the form of images of the earthquake areas is very helpful in our timely acquirement of first hand information for disaster assessment. Your support has played a unique role in assisting our estimation about the magnitude of damage and greatly empowered the rescue and relief efforts to reduce the casualties and damage.”
Meanwhile Gary C is looking tired. He has only had four hours sleep. All of the satellites have now been tasked and are busy collecting images over the earthquake zone on the other side of the world. “Time for more strong coffee…” he says, raising himself out of his chair for the first time in several hours. As he walks out of the room he hears the soundtrack from “Thunderbirds” and International Rescue. It must be a Friday.
