Terra Motion Limited –– the UK company that processes satellite data to detect land subsidence measurements in remote areas and identifies carbon potential from peatlands from space – has come to Canada. In October 2022, Terra Motion partnered with Space Strategies Consulting Limited, a provider of space operational solutions, to open Terra Motion Canada. The firm is located in Kanata, the high tech suburb west of Ottawa.
Terra Motion’s ground-imaging acumen is based on its APSIS™ (Advanced Pixel System using Intermittent SBAS) software. APSIS collects satellite radar imagery from space-based sources such as Sentinel-1, RADARSAT, and the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM ), and processes it using artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) Big Data analytical tools. This advanced approach to interferometric analysis allows APSIS to measure and quantify ground surface movement across large areas of remote/inaccessible terrain, and to locate areas of peatland that can be monitored and potentially restored.
“Infrastructure is one of the areas that we’re focussed on,” said Ken Chadder, President of Terra Motion Canada. “This includes airfields, railways, roads, fuel tank farms, mining tailing dams, and things that may not be located within an urban environment, where you’re interested in not only these types of infrastructure but also the surrounding areas. Peatland monitoring and restoration as it pertains to generating carbon credits for business is another priority. An example of this is determining areas where the land could have been adversely affected by mining and oil & gas exploration and monitoring its restoration.”
Looking forward, Terra Motion Canada plans to develop a peatland monitoring, reporting, and validation process, for use by businesses restoring carbon-retaining peatlands to offset their companies’ carbon emissions. “We’ve established a protocol to work with carbon registries, which is currently being used in Europe and other countries,” Chadder said. “We think that’s an area that could certainly be of interest to Canadian businesses.”
Although Terra Motion Canada is a new company, it is already working with federal and provincial/territorial governments on a number of projects.
A case in point: “We have a partnership with C-CORE to provide infrastructure monitoring in the Northwest Territories to the territorial government there,” said Chadder. “We’ve also got an Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) contract with the federal government to look around the globe for areas where there may be underground activities occurring. We start by using small-scale imagery with the ability to identify potential areas of interest, and then move to higher resolution imagery to determine if there’s underground activities such as mining, underground military facilities, bunkers, and the like being built.”
Overall, Terra Motion Canada’s goal is to take the APSIS software developed by Terra Motion in the UK, and work with Space Strategies Consulting Limited to fine-tune it first for the Canadian market, and then North America as a whole. So far business is brisk: “Our business development team is extremely busy looking at and chasing down potential opportunities and strategic partnerships with engineering firms, provincial/territorial governments, and the federal government,” Chadder said. “So we’ve had great interest so far and I think that this will only increase over time.”