ESA Activities in Earth Observation for Cultural Heritage Applications

Abstract

An overview is provided of the activities of the European Space Agency, ESA, to support the documentation, monitoring and management of Cultural Heritage through the use of Earth Observation, EO. These activities include: participation in international agreements; funding of service demonstration projects and support to researchers through the provision of data, training courses and the hosting of research students at the ESA European Space Research Institute, ESRIN, establishment. Since ESA and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, signed the “Open Initiative on the Use of Space Technologies to Support the World Heritage Convention”, world heritage has become increasingly prominent in ESA as an emerging application area. Various demonstration projects have successfully revealed the potential to bridge the gap between research and operational service delivery. These projects include Heritage Observation and Retrieval Under Sand, HORUS, which used radar to document archaeological structures buried beneath the sand in Egypt, and ArchEO, a project recently kicked-off, aimed at demonstrating optical Earth observation techniques for the detection of archaeological structures in Poland. An increasing number of research projects are exploiting ESA and Third Party Mission, TPM, data for cultural heritage applications. Some of these include a project using radar remote sensing for subsurface archaeological feature detection, a project focussing on monitoring land subsidence over Syrian archaeological sites using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, InSAR, and a project documenting archaeological structures over the Silk Road in China. In addition to the provision of data and processing tools, ESA supports the heritage research and user community through training courses that focus on the application of EO for cultural heritage. Finally, ESA contributes to workshops to provide a forum for the heritage and remote sensing communities to exchange ideas, and provide insights into evolving user needs and technological achievements. ESA activities are driven by user requirements. The increasing involvement of ESA in EO related activities in cultural heritage is indicative of the emerging awareness of the benefits of EO on the part of the heritage community, and their growing interest in its integration into their activities. In order to most efficiently channel resources and plan future EO developments to meet this increased demand, interdisciplinary dialogue is essential between the heritage and remote sensing communities.