On 7 December, the International Space and Innovation Centre (ISIC) received £3 million for the
Climate and Environmental Monitoring from Space (CEMS) facility. The funding was announced by David
Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, as part of a £4.75 million government grant for electronic
infrastructure to support the collection, storage and management of satellite data.

The £3 million is being channelled by the UK Space Agency into the core computing infrastructure
required to make the ISIC CEMS facility a reality. CEMS is being designed as a collaborative framework
to support the open innovation necessary to stimulate growth in the Earth observation downstream
market.

Improved access will encourage businesses to create new offerings and applications for Earth
observation data, and in turn creating jobs and supporting world-class scientific research, increasing
the UK’s share of the global market.

Barbara Ghinelli, ISIC Executive Chair commented, “ISIC is creating the world’s first academic-industrial
CEMS facility to enable data to be preserved and visualised in a useful and accessible way. It will enable
commercial and scientific applications and services to be developed and hosted alongside key data
sets and high performance processing capability; and will provide the essential data quality and
integrity tools to give users complete confidence and transparency in its data, services and products.”

CEMS is also designed to secure the UK’s world leadership position in climate science, technology and
services and support the ESA Climate Office at Harwell, pulling together key capability from the UK
(including SME’s) for key opportunities such as GMES climate services.

For more information please contact Karen Rogers at karen.rogers@isic-space.com or on
+44 (0)7841 066839.