A European consortium, led by RadioLabs (Italy) and including GTD (Spain), made a successful bid for an ESA contract on the topic “Space Assets for Demining Assistance”. The SAFEDEM (Space Assets For Enhanced DEMining) project, aims at delivering a feasibility study on new services – enabled by existing space technologies and assets – to assist land release for improved socio-economic impact. Nowadays landmines and Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) still represent a danger for civilians, even long after conflicts. In addition, both dramatically hinder the recovery of economies wounded by a conflict, because resources located within areas such as arable land, infrastructure and water suspected of mine contamination cannot be exploited. In the last years, many efforts have been done in demining actions, in order to accelerate the global humanitarian demining effort through an increase in investment and an effective international coordination in demining and assistance. Nevertheless assuming no additional mines are laid from now on, it could still take hundreds of years to find and clear all the landmines around the world. The need of efficient demining actions is also supported by cost factors: ESA claims that the average cost of clearance is around 1 $/m2, whereas well-informed land release (without such clearance efforts) costs only 0.02-0.05 $/m2. Leveraging on the main needs of world‐wide community against landmines, it seems reasonable to focus new efforts in employing new potential methodologies and technologies –such as space assets– to enhance actual landmine clearance solutions and improve effectiveness of detection problem (i.e. mapping and land release). In SAFEDEM project, innovative methodologies based on the STREAM concepts and platforms, and well suited space assets – namely Earth Observation, Satellite Navigation, and Communication – will be all involved for an integrated end‐to‐end demining assistance service. SAFEDEM main objective is therefore to identify and assess the feasibility and viability of an innovative integration of space assets and services to improve and optimize planning, preparation, efficiency and impact on land release activities in Mine Action. This goal will be achieved through three stages: • the development of a proof of concept for the designed system and services; • the assessment – together with the users – of the proposed system and its associated services, including its added value and that of the space assets, and the analysis of its economic and non-economic viability; • the preparation of a roadmap towards sustainable services. To do so, SAFEDEM consortium gathers key players in the demining value chain to answer project challenges and expectations: • Prime contractor: Radiolabs (Italy). It has the project management responsibility and it is involved in the activities related to the navigation space asset. • GTD Sistemas de Información, S.A. (Spain). It is involved in all the IT and Computer Science activities. As developer of the STREAM platforms, GTD leads the activities of integration of the platform itself with the space assets. • Agenzia Industrie Difesa - AID (Italy) (User Partner). It is an authoritative entity that can certify the validity of the proposal and of the proof-of-concept results. • University of Rome “Sapienza” (Italy). It is involved in the activities related to the telecommunication space asset, in data mining, data fusion and data processing. • MEEO - Meteorological Environment Earth Observation (Italy). It is involved in the activities related to Earth observation space asset, in the automatic recognition of direct and indirect mine indicators, and in the generation of risk maps that support decisions from operators. • Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). It is involved in the definition of the main workflows, use cases of the system and in the design of Earth Observation – GIS risk analysis procedures.
