This month, another member was welcomed to the Orbital Eye Team! We are happy to have Stijn Hoefsloot on board as an R&D intern. Below you can find a nice introduction by Stijn!

“Most people call me Stijn and I have been wandering around on this beautiful planet for about 26 years now. After finishing my bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Twente, some side routes here and there, I am now close to obtaining my MSc degree in Aerospace Engineering with an emphasis on Spaceflight at the TU Delft.

I am a product of Dutch soil and grew up in the suburbs of Wageningen Metropolis where chirping birds, swirling rivers, and flourishing forests were key elements in forming the person I have become today. Although I might not be the nimble hind I so often dream about, I do like to dance, hike, break my legs on a kiteboard, pick elderflower blossoms, you name it.

In the last couple of years I have been indoctrinated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, especially regarding climate change, preservation of nature, and affordable clean water supplies everywhere in the world. It’s not always easy to link the above mentioned to the often abstract and non-environmental friendly Space Industry.

At Orbital Eye I have found a vibrant learning environment where state-of-the-art‘ space technology’ is being applied to leave a positive societal and environmental impact on our beloved Earth. In the coming months, I will be working on automating and optimizing the optical tasking of high-res satellites. ”

Last month, Alexander Blauw and Arnaud van den Berg visited the Pipeline Technology Conference (ptc) in Berlin. At the conference, they presented how Orbital Eye’s satellite-based RoW monitoring solution was deployed as an operational monitoring method in the Netherlands and in Trinidad and Tobago, and how CoSMiC-EYE performs once deployed operationally.

You can take a look at the conference paper here:

PTC_2022_OrbitalEye

Interested to hear how CoSMiC-EYE can be deployed operationally to monitor Third Party Interferences around your pipeline network? Send an email to info@orbitaleye.nl

We are proud to announce that we have also expanded our services to Asia, as we started monitoring in Thailand! We are now monitoring over 2500 kilometers of PTT Public Company Limited‘s pipeline network with CoSMiC-EYE, to detect any potentially hazardous activities close to the pipeline. PTT Public Company Limited is the Thai national oil and gas company, engaged in supplying, transporting, and distributing oil and gas. By integrating CoSMiC-EYE into their monitoring processes, PTT increases pipeline safety, and at the same time is a front-runner when it comes to sustainable monitoring!

Monitoring such a large pipeline network is the next big achievement for Orbital Eye. Starting with small pilots in which we monitored just a couple of 100 kilometers, to now monitoring national gas transportation networks required a lot of team effort and dedication, but we are proud that we have successfully made this step! Our partnerships with Geoserve BV and SkyWatch also play an important role in this – also for this project those partners ensure the continuous acquisition and delivery of high-resolution optical satellite data from Planet, Airbus, and SuperView satellites.

We are looking forward to continuing this collaboration with PTT and contributing to pipeline safety in yet another continent!

And we’re there! On the way to the Pipeline Technology Conference (PTC) 2022 at the Estrel Berlin, Alexander Blauw and Arnaud van den Berg already encountered the first pipelines.

Looking forward to meeting old contacts and new people at the PTC!