New ESA activity will support the progressive integration of Greece’s Governmental Earth Observation Hub within Europe’s emerging resilience architecture.

Planetek Hellas and its consortium partners have kicked off a new activity, with the European Space Agency (ESA) for the definition of the Space Resilience Node for Greece (SRN-GR).

The activity has been launched within ESA's new European Resilience from Space – Earth Observation (ERS-EO) programme, under Element 2 initiative and aims to define, prototype and validate a national Space Resilience Node built around the existing Greek Governmental Earth Observation Hub.

Rather than creating a separate infrastructure, SRN-GR will build on Greece’s existing national Earth Observation capabilities and define the interfaces and mechanisms required for their progressive interoperability with the wider European SRN environment.

The initial operational focus will address wildfire-flood cascading risk, combining Earth Observation information with complementary environmental and contextual data. The solution will be based on three main components: federated external-data curation and normalisation, a multi-source risk intelligence capability, and user-oriented dashboards supporting operational decision-making.

The architecture will be designed to support future extension to additional hazards, datasets, users and services, while maintaining alignment with ESA’s evolving ERS-SRN Reference Framework.

“Greece is well-positioned to take the step to build the SRN-GR on top of the already ongoing activities and to move forwards to the interoperable SRN ecosystem. The SRN-GR can bring in important lessons learnt, knowhow and solutions to the SRN ecosystem and boost the development activities” said Hanna-Miina Sihvonen, ESA ERS-EO SRN manager. 

“SRN-GR is an important initiative for Greece. It capitalises on the investments we have made through our national Earth Observation programme and the Governmental EO Hub, ensuring that these national assets deliver value well beyond our borders. At the same time, it sets the basis for Greece’s involvement in ESA’s European Resilience from Space programme, positioning our national infrastructure, industry and research community to contribute to a federated European resilience capability from the very start.” siad Dimitris Bliziotis, Greek Delegate to the ESA Programme Board for Earth Observation (PB-EO), Hellenic Space Center.

“Greece’s investment in its national Earth Observation programme has created an anchor tenancy that allows Greek industry to develop and demonstrate real capabilities at home. Our responsibility now is to transform that national investment into European competitiveness. With SRN-GR, we are taking another concrete step towards enabling sovereign national infrastructures such as the Greek Governmental EO Hub to progressively become part of a federated European architecture through ESA’s European Resilience from Space initiative and, looking ahead, the future EOGS.” said Stelios Bollanos, CEO of Planetek Hellas.

In this activity, Planetek Hellas acts as Prime Contractor, leading a Greek consortium together with the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and CogniSensus.

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