t ecosystem so let me read that quote that was very important for us when we started to compare the orbital the debris problems with the climate change so the quote is the of the professor after the came that is uh was an american professor and an expert in uh in regulation so he developed a theory the theory of the small decision he said that the theory of the small decision is a situation in which a series of small individual rational decision cumulative result in a larger and the significant outcome which is a nature optimal nor the side and can negative change the context of choices even to the point where the side alternatives are irreversibly destroyed so it was uh this was this what is happening with the space debris and the challenges and the comparison that we did with the uh natural ecosystem and orbit ecosystem thank you clearly i understand there's some problems with my connection um so hopefully folks can hear me if not okay sounds like it's better so we'll we'll try this and if uh if my internet goes bad again we'll uh have to see if i have a colleague step in my apologies here so charity luke the next question is going to be basically the same question for both of you so maybe if i can have charity go first and then luke um once charity finishes and the question is what is your company doing to respond to the challenges that darin and clillia have just uh talked about what near-term mission milestones uh can we look for from your company so charity first and then to luke thank you great uh can you hear me in can you hear me i can hear you yes okay great just wanted to check uh thank you uh it's a pleasure to be here appreciate the invitation um so space sustainability is a growing market and an essential element of a robust space economy astroscale is on the leading edge of an emerging on-arbit services market we're developing technologies the business models and driving the policy discussions globally we support the management of the space environment via life extension in-situ space situation awareness end of life which is disposal of prepared objects and active debris removal which is disposal of unprepared objects key to these missions what many on-arbit services have in common are rendezvous and proximity operations docking and capture automation and ground support command and control and this is why our first in-orbit demo for end of life services will naturally advance efforts across all these business lines our very own lcd end of life services by astroscale demo is the first commercial mission to demonstrate end-to-end debris docking and removal and it launched in March of this year and we'll be testing a series of progressively difficult maneuvers to capture a prepared salate one equipped with a lightweight docking plate that was stacked with our servicer lcd has since passed its major operational checkups and we will begin the demonstrations later on the summer you can track lcd on our website and we are sharing ephemeris covariance and maneuver plans with both isa and the 18th notably this demonstration is entirely self-funded lcd is exciting because it's that first demonstration of an end-to-end debris docking and removal we see all debris as a threat to space commerce exploration national security critical services and our way of life and while small debris is clearly problematic it's also important to prevent large debris from becoming smaller pieces of debris by remediating those objects that pose the greatest threat last year astroscale was selected as commercial partner for jacks's commercial removal debris demonstration phase one which is the inspection of an upper stage rocket body expected to launch by 2023 finally let's not forget space sustainability also involves economic sustainability in orbit last year astroscale announced its entry into the satellite life extension market which adds value and ensures effective use of the limited natural resource that is geo so i'll just pause there and hand it over to duke thank you thank you for having me on this panel so clear space is a spin off from the epfl in lozan it's it's initially it's a team of engineers epfl that's been working since 2010 to find a solution to actually remove space debris from orbit and the project has initiated after launching a cubesat straight into the field of debris of the kosmos iridium collision which generated obviously a lot of conjunction notifications and and and really brought our team to start thinking to okay what what can what can be done and what should be done to address the growing problem of space debris clear space has been spun off in 2018 and we signed a contract with european space agency to lead the first debris removal mission where we have as objective to go pick up a piece of debris that belongs to the european space agency um in orbits and remove it by end of 2025 this mission called clear space one is um is a is um is is is the first mission to execute the complete value chain of removing a piece of debris from orbit addressing all the different dimension whether legal legal challenges uh liability challenges but also technical challenges and how to actually pick up a non-corporative object in orbit today clear space is about 40 employees we work with an extensive industrial team across europe and we're in the first phases of the development of our mission all right thank you charity thank you luke and i think we'll have time to come back to some of these activities and in the subsequent discussions i'm already seeing um some questions in the chat that have to do with the specifics of astroscale and clear space mission so well we'll get to those towards the end of the panel as well today here um but i want to turn now to uh to asha um so i referenced the g7 statement at the beginning of this uh panel and we've also seen in the u.s. national space policy a goal to evaluate and pursue active debris removal and in january of this year we saw the nasa inspector general uh issuer report the office of the inspector general issuer issuer report that argues that mitigation alone is not sufficient and that we need more strategic remediations uh strategic remediation activities to address space debris can you tell us about the current state of u.s. government activities regarding active debris removal sure thank you for inviting me on to talk about this topic so um in addition in january not just the oig from nasa issued a report but the ostp the office of science technology policy the white house also issued a national orbital debris research and development plan which laid out some of the research priorities for all areas with respected debris so there were kind of three major thrusts in that one was um debris mitigation one was tracking and characterization of debris which is very related to ssa and stm and the third one really for the first time in sort of a national level document like this they um addressed remediation of debris as a core element or a core area and they they then further sort of described three particular research and development efforts that um agencies should move forward with and these were develop remediation repurposing technologies and techniques for large debris objects as well as the same type of thing but not repurposing technologies but remediation technologies and techniques for small debris objects so similar to kind of what darin was talking about there are many ways to go about this and that paper of 50 derelict objects they're very large ones that that that one could could um try and and remove for the purposes of removing risk long term but then there's also a lot of discussion with respect to lethal non-trackable debris that's you know could be mission-ending and so they identified two areas and then the third one which i think is a really important area and it's one that i think a lot of the people on this panel have talked about is developing models for risk and cost benefit analysis and i think that everybody sort of feels like there are models out there they may touch on some aspects of risk or some aspects of um a pertinent certain type of debris but we really haven't seen sort of a holistic model looking at all of the trade-offs between between the impacts of the probabilities as well as the different orbits and the regimes and then and and sort of the numbers of satellites that are going up in that area and not just technical risk but also economic risk as well um i would say the the last thing is you know we do need better data so that tracking and characterization piece that is part of the r&d plan is a really important piece because the models are only as good as the data that we have and i i fear that for the large debris we have you know better data and there's more work going on with some of the nc2 ssa and and some improvements and space vents and coming online and those kinds of things but i think on the small debris scale we don't have um as much good data that has really um good accuracy to it to really understand the environment enough so i would say lastly on the adr technology and where the where the u.s. government is i think they're still in the this is a long term thing and that there is no one agency that has the mission nor the funding to do this and so that's where we're stuck we're stuck with that when it comes to space traffic management we're stuck with that when it comes to to adr as well so i feel like there needs to be a little bit of uh unsticking in in the government realm yeah indeed the the who uh and then what one agency in that question is one that is is coming up in several different areas of u.s. space policy right now and um seems good well it's not a means to it either um so i think maybe uh that might again be another one that we come back to here um as we go because i think that relates um it certainly relates to the previous panel with the space traffic management question and it relates to this as well so um speaking of the previous panel um that previous panel we just had a good discussion of some of the challenges that that the policy and regulatory structure for these large constellations uh pose and the the topic of debris certainly came up in that discussion um as well darin in his talk suggested that these large constellation operators might actually potentially be a victim of some of this regulatory attention in that the existing risk from the large objects is is where some of the real challenges and these constellations are operating in that environment right um so i want to pose a question uh to you charity your company has worked with one of these large constellation operators and some technology development programs along with the european space agency what is the role of the large constellation community in addressing the debris challenge on orbit uh well yeah just great to point out that astroscale did announce a partnership with one web in may to develop an elsa that can conduct multiple end of life disposals and you know per your comment on darin he's he always does make good points uh darin like debris approximately 8 000 tons of it is a real threat to operators in orbit however as we increase the use of orbit we need to prevent additions to this derelict population right so any additions pose a threat to creating those lethal non-trackable that ash was talking about but also interrupt critical services in commerce by requiring more collision avoidance maneuvers so even if they devote deorbit within the international norm of 25 years they're still creating a perturbation if you will on uh the normal operations in orbit large constellations are exciting and they bring a wealth of benefits just here on earth and i personally know people in communities who are benefiting from the proliferation of access to space but we can't add to the population of debris in space now and and we need to be responsive to new hazards and congestions uh so this means one of two things for constellation providers and really all operators in space either ensure high high reliability of satellites which might be rather expensive or have a plan for a controlled disposal at end of mission regulators under article 6 of the outer space treaty need to make sure one of these two options happen and there's no middle ground here in terms of space safety so what does this mean and how do we get from here that's the you know major question at hand i i feel the first step is to measure accurately what that risk of a system is meaning the entire system's risk needs to be measured for probability of collision next we need to cap that risk no one wants excessive or unlimited risk in this business it would simply drive investors away and third proper monitoring is needed of this risk profile that constellations are imposing on the space environment right now there are educated guesses of at best of how a constellation may impact environment how about a near real time update as the system is deployed and finally there is no use making limits if regulators aren't going to enforce said limits so sure customer access to the benefit of a constellation should be economic natural economic driver to limit debris but what if it's not well then governments are ultimately liable for private operator activity so there should be financial carrots and sticks as asha mentioned the economic drivers here that drive responsible behaviors in space and limit debris so just foot stomping we're all in this together operational satellites that can maneuver around debris are good things transparency and information sharing among operators to understand who's doing what is a good thing space situational awareness is a good thing space traffic coordination and management is a good thing but inactive satellites without collision avoidance raining down through operational orbits and human spaceflight is not a good thing and i don't care if that takes two five or 25 years to deorbit i count current large debris objects among the items that are not conducive to a successful space environment or space economy thank you jerry and we're seeing i'm seeing a lot of questions coming in in the the audience here so this is good i've got a couple more i want to ask that we that we discussed in advance but we're going to get to those those audience questions so keep them coming so clearly this next one i'm going to go i'm going to turn to you so both asha and jerry now have mentioned the need to create economic incentives and possibly you know the consequences and and enforcement penalties that might come along with that from your standpoint does the rise of large constellations does that pose or offer any sort of solution or relationship to the economic challenge of addressing space debris does it kind of change the way that we think about the economics of the space debris challenge so this was the the point that helped us as a resort center when we started our resort so and in particular the question that guide has was is the market that can solve the problem of the space debris or we need the government intervention in order to solve this kind of problem so i i did before the parallel with the climate change that was a useful example to understand the role of the public and also the private sector for sure this question so is is the market that that can solve this problem so we try to answer to this question through a simulation of different scenarios so so we try to understand the first of all the risk so if the risk of collision is in the medium term or sorry in the short term in the medium term on the long term so this for short change the position of the private sector in order to invest in such technologies and we started the first of all to understand which kind of technologies that the private sector can use and have the economic incentive to use in order to avoid and to solve the problem of the space debris and we we analyze the the the mitigation of for example post mission disposal or collision avoidance technologies active debris removal technology so we saw that this technology in a stack to mitigate the risk of collision and in particular the the post mission disposal solution was in our in our point of view first of all a good solution to solve to mitigate the collision because we saw the curve of the risk lower than the the curve of the risk of collision so this this was the the in in our conclusion a cheap solution for the private sector in order to have economic incentive to invest and to use the post mission disposal for sure if the risk isn't the short term if the risk in other scenarios so that was in the long term I don't think that the private sector would use this kind of solution so to use its their fuel in order to the orbit the satellites so I think that in the long term scenario we saw and I think that the private sector decided to to leave their satellites to to fail to to to the orbit and I think that in this case the active debris removal is needed for the death satellite in this case but also for for the active debris removal is a question that I asked myself but also when I talk with my colleagues is that is there the market for the active debris removal yeah so I think you're hitting on I think a number of themes there right one that we've talked a lot already in this panel about the need to have a good understanding characterization of the technical and economic risk and being able to communicate that across actors you're also talking about you know active debris removal is part of an overall scope of responses that operators use to talk you need to take here including you know simply post mission disposal compliances is important and operating and the business plan so Luke turning to you now so Chloe I talked about you know whether if there is or is not a private market for active debris removal your company is trying to find that market right that is what both you and then part and part of aster skills business as well right so outside of technology what factors do we need to have further development in to enable the commercial debris removal market well I think to to reflect on what has been said until now I agree with Darren I write that large object or a major issue and have to be addressed and I agree with charity that we have to build up a solution that is sustainable for the future I think the first thing is that we we have to overall generally whether if it's agencies or commercial commercial operation recognize the complete cost of space operation and the complete cost of space operation means the complete cost of a sustainable space operation and in this cost removal of debris has to be included you cannot consider that you looked at the complete mission so okay now it flies we paid for it we operated we operated this platform with a satellite for a while everything's okay whether it's fails or not in orbit and often what has been done in the past is that when you look at the overall cost of a space mission you would go all the way up to the point where the satellite fails in orbit or is the orbited if it has been the orbited and I think this is not the complete cost the complete the complete cost should include also the the orbiting and specifically I mean in if you follow the the logic of Darren specifically for for the most dangerous and problematic objects in orbit to start with and this means that the first thing that has to happen is that agencies has to start looking at the object they have an orbit is okay what kind of project can we put in place to make sure that we don't produce a situation which will affect everyone in the future but then beyond that I think this has to be also integrated in the business case for commercial operators and the question then is what is the dynamics the financial dynamics that makes that the payment of that kind of service is just a natural a step of a complete business case so I think this this dimension is really important regulation we have a lot of regulation today that are in place already there's a lot of things that are just not applied I think and and the other part that is happening right now that we can see happening much faster than we actually expected when we created their space is the is the the conscience of the problem right I remember for years before we created their space people would tell us nobody will ever pay for that nobody will ever pay for the orbit mission why would anybody pay for that doesn't make any sense right you just removing a piece of debris to make space for the others I mean it's it's the tragedy of the commons there's no reason why somebody should ever pay for that and when we created clear space when we founded the company at the beginning we thought it's gonna it's gonna be hard to find investors so we should find sponsors to actually make a demonstration and we were surprised to see how quickly everything evolved and we see that the timing is right to affect change today so what has to be done is first I think that agencies start thinking about the object in orbit I think what's interesting actually in the list of the 15 more dangerous object in orbit is that there's not a single American one in the list what is just one I think there should be more transparency about what's up there there should be a conscience in the in the agency start and think okay how do we put in place a budget that makes sure that we that we increase the space of operational orbits there's some orbits where a constellation already cannot operate today which are there's some orbits where you can already see kessler's syndromes appearing right so you see that's happening already today it's a very slow evolving a problem but it's it's already there so the first step for me is I think is those list I agree with Darren that those list of 50 objects have to be addressed and and agree with charity we have to build up the constellations in a way that takes in accounts all the different outcomes of an end of mission and actually just addresses them in a consistent logical way thank you Luke and you've you've you've teed up the the question I want to start with from the audience we almost like we planned this but we just worked out this way so you were you were talking at the end of that remark about how to you know communicate the value and the need to start working on these top 50 objects and to start working on on integrating you know this into the business case of the large constellations and designing those to operate safely and sustainably so the question yeah so the the question I'm going to put up on the screen here shortly here I'm going to ask Asha to start and then the other panelists to come in so Asha as we try to communicate the need to address debris to remove the large objects to figure out how to field active debris removal services but how should we how should we as a community be communicating that to lawmakers and to policymakers is there anything you've seen in your experience where messaging has worked well or perhaps has not and then I'll let the other panelists come in as they as they think there um so I haven't seen much in my experience in terms of like moving this forward to get sort of the you know ssa and stm you know we're still waiting on that uh I think that with respect to adr though one thing that I think might work if we if not we I'm not an advocate here but if one was to pull a story together about the cost now versus the cost later I think you have to think about you know it might seem expensive now with lots of dollar signs or euros but if you waited and it created a more kind of much more untenable situation down the line than the cost or move millions of pieces of debris if things ended up colliding or you know so that that comes back to the data and that comes back to the models so we need to be able to have really robust models with good data right not data that we took you know and shuttle windows in 2011 or 20 you know 2009 for for for um predicting what the debris environment is we need really you know good data on the small debris side as well as the large one to feed into these models so we can convince ourselves of understanding you know what does it look like down the line and if we did this now yes it's going to cost money but it's going to cost a lot less than if we did it later thank you for that charity um asha reminds me of a great quote from darin um pay me now or pay me more later is is essentially what he says there's a good paper at isc on that recommend everyone read that and just just to quickly add on this really comes down to domestic priorities right those policy priorities uh clearly europe and japan uh have made it a priority to invest in research and development for debris removal and therefore there are programs and i feel that adr and just generically on our resources writ large check a lot of domestic priority boxes for the united states in particular of international collaboration technology development growing the industry national security application to exploration and just simple leadership you know being involved and making sure that the united states is is involved in uh ensuring you know the norms and leading the rules and the norms and behavior on this sort of activity as well so the stars are aligned uh it just needs action like other domestic priorities do i mean i think we could certainly interpret the g7 statement as you know a recognition of wanting to take that leadership that that you're talking about their cherry but you know it's now it's a good statement let's work on the on the follow through and yeah providing that the story and implementation that needs to be provided um all right so uh we are fully into the audience q and a portion here so um we're going to jump around to some uh to some different subjects here as we go but i'm sure the same some same commonality and threads will come up um so uh the the next one um it kind of goes uh towards uh you know spurring action and and some of the tools that we might or might not use um and so collily i'm going to put you on the spot uh to answer this first and then other panelists might might come in because there's a little bit of economic theory behind this that um so uh with a prize model or a bounty model uh provide an effective incentive uh to remove some of these hazardous objects that we're talking about yes it was was mentioned before so i think that uh uh if we demonstrate that the risk is now so is not in the long term but isn't the short term i think that is the important point to to um to change the government attitude to fund to fund the technologies or to find the private sector in order to take the action to mitigate the the the space debris so this is the the point that i want to stress about that to understand to demonstrate uh the the risk because this is the one point that can convince the governments to take an action and it was happening with the the environment on earth so before you mentioned that if we we pay now invest now in the future we you know we will have uh less cost about to invest to technologies and this is true so if we invest now to the technologies to help the private sector in order to avoid and to mitigate the risk also there are several options that the government can do is to fund to fund the technologies so all through the public private partnership is a good solution in order to um to invest in technologies such as active debris removal because we know that the active debris removal is a costly solution if we compare these technologies with other technology technologies so this was uh we the logic that we we did when we started our research so to understand to compare the cost of the different solution and we know that the active debris removal is a costly technologies and there is the need of the government to co-fund this kind of solution and the public private partnership would be uh so an option in order to to help uh the private sector so that's a an interesting suggestion that that use of the the ppp model which we've seen for other areas of of kind of government and commercial cooperation on on space system development with success might be something that that we look at here and I think there are there are elements of public private partnership in both some of the both the clear space mission and some of the the astroscale partnerships as well so I think that is something that the governments are are looking at um all right so the next round of questions is going to be a lightning round for our astroscale and clear space colleagues we have a lot of questions um in the chat about where you guys are going what your missions look like and and how you interact with each other so Asha and Chloe I mean you can chime in if you have anything on there but it might be a brief break for you so um putting the question up but uh the the first question just gonna get started here um clear space and astroscale are you guys competitors and are there others in your market space if you are so uh Luke and Luke and uh Charity I don't know who wants to who wants to take that one on but but go for it I think I think to be competitor there should be the market already probably um uh it it is uh we we have regular interactions and and and we obviously see each other because we we are trying to produce the same change in the industry maybe with a different approach in different regions um but at the end we what we see is that the market when it activates to to actually address all that requires more than both of our companies to actually address the complete problem so there there's plenty of room uh to do a lot of work um right right now what we can see is that we we are active while in Europe we're active together astroscale is active in in the UK uh but otherwise I mean we we are on a European mission astroscale is on a Japanese mission uh the question is how far can international collaboration work and and that's one of the question that will at some point come up mostly also because for many uh the ADR technologies are considered as dual use right and there can be limitations and strategic interests from different countries around that um but yeah I think at the end we we might likely end up competing on the on some market and collaborating some others I'll just echo some of what Luke said maybe less competitors and more pioneers aren't we Luke uh in this space and and really this industry needs to be collaborative at this moment very moment we need to get together to build those policy and best practices to conduct these operations safely as a small difference between our companies I feel astroscale is looking at a whole suite of on-orbit services in a number of orbits ADR is just one of those missions right you if you can rendezvous with uh another object in orbit you can provide in situ ssa life extension you know maintenance etc etc um and just a shout out to those industry associations and industry groups that are driving best practices and making sure this is a sustainable and safe um market is the consortium for the execution of rendezvous and servicing of course there's other ad hoc groups like the space safety coalition uh and I know that uh you know probably Luke's company and and astroscale we're part of many many discussions with our industry colleagues so it needs to be collaborative thank you and you know so we had a question there that you already both have already spoken to about whether you're you know doing the same thing or our definitive differences it's a little bit of a little bit of both right I like charity I like the phrasing you know pioneers uh not competitors right because as Luke said you know make the market and then compete for the market um so uh Luke you've already teed up the next question um very nicely um you keep doing that for me so thank you um the uh there's a question from the audience um so Luke you mentioned there's some potential dual use implications of some of this technology right for adr for servicing um so the question is are your companies doing anything to make sure that adr operations don't create security concerns and so what is the relationship between you know civil adr technology that we're talking about in this panel and some of the the national security implications that that might I think for uh to do a mission that has uh national security implication you have to be placed on the right orbit you you have to get uh notarization to launch um this means that uh you would have either to have notarization by launching state that that actually knows what you're planning to do because you have to provide a lot of content a lot of detail about what you're gonna do in orbit especially if you do you know in orbit servicing this is already quite a deterrent the other aspect is that um we look at it for us it's quite obvious that the solution we're building is is a sustainability solution that that's what we're after that's what we try to build and and I'm certain the astroscale as well uh we want to address a fundamental problem and um in our perspective that there's a lot of dimension that can make uh if you want to deabilitate or break a satellite or a military satellite you you you don't necessarily need to actually capture it you you you need to collide with it you need to do other stuff and there's probably ways that are much more cost-effective to actually do that than actually do the complete exercises we we do it in addition to that I think that it's a little like an ambulance you don't use an ambulance for warfare uh mostly because you know that if you start to do that the cost benefits in terms of of of your complete exercise makes it uh illogical right it you you have more to lose than to win if you if you start using it this way so that that's the way we look at it maybe it's a little naive when it comes to military application but for us it's clearly the approach is very clearly and has to remain a sustainability uh solution that we we are building here nevertheless it's a solution that is dual use and will be classified as dual use um what we export and what we how we addressed it because the question obviously came in from the Swiss government when we uh when we started working on the first mission for ESA the question came up and it it comes up on a regular basis what we export is a service and not uh not the spacecraft or the technology itself uh i'll just add that astroscale categorically is against the deliberate creation of debris and orbit okay that is incredibly important and that is our ethos and the reason why we stood up as a company beyond that the government uh sort of point fingers here can be the worst offender of debris generating um a debris generation and orbit especially the last six decades so we feel that government should be customers of our services right to prevent um debris incidents from occurring um just you know echoing luke uh you know private operators are regulated uh by domestic um domestic nations and therefore we have to adhere to space safety standards we also are pushing norms of behavior best practices in this uh skate in this uh market as well and you know as i said we're regulated and want to develop uh solutions not create problems so that's all i say about that so thank you and i think you know an important point that i think both of you are talking about right is you know we discussed earlier transparency and sharing of information right and there's going to be you know a civil commercial mission there's going to be a you know an emphasis on transparency and and information sharing always we hope that helps to distinguish those sorts of activities from something that might be more national security in nature um so thank you charity and luke for the clear space and astroscale uh portion of this uh of this questioning i'm going to try and open up to a broader question now the number of questions in the chat about you know um removing uh spent rocket bodies right and we know the majority of those bodies are russian and um and the chinese ones as well right from the top 50 list um there's a there's a legal and policy question here around uh permissions to to use to remove those objects responsibility to remove those objects and liability associated that right so a broad question about what legal and policy tools can we think about to address nations that do not consent to the removal of their derelict objects or to encourage those nations to to start participating in removal of those objects so um open to anyone on the panel who wants to to try to take that thorny issue on did that not come through no it's a little better now though um i'm not going to be able to answer that question i think that's a really really hard question i think we're all sort of silent because we don't know this is really an international cooperation diplomacy issue i mean this has to this cannot be solved by technology development when one of the things that we when we um helped support sort of the orbital debris uh r&d plan we looked at okay what are the big challenges in orbital debris you know irrespective of r&d what are the major challenges and then what can r&d solve and r&d can solve some of the challenges but they cannot solve the liability challenge they cannot solve you know um post mission disposal people complying with the 25 year rule they cannot solve the the registration challenge and so these are things that have to happen on the diplomatic efforts and you know i i'm now going to step back and feign that you know although i'm a panel policy analyst i'm an engineer and i'm not the diplomat so i'll add in that when we say we look to leadership of this sort of issue this is what we're talking about we'd like to see nations get together and discuss what is that pathway forward before technology catches up to that to that eventuality because technology will run fast here and we hope that nations will be able to have an open dialogue and come to some sort of solution and i think if i can also add to it um i think that there's some there's some good news in the complete in the situation there've been collaboration where objects from different countries including russia and us docked in orbit right and this happened in the past this kind of collaboration was possible in the past and uh this is a field where we have to put aside where governments have to put aside a competition on on the military scale to really look into collaborating to address a common problem and it if it has been possible for the iss it has to be possible for the brewery removal and because because we all coexist in the same environment we all benefit from the same environment and this cannot be treated in a usual competitive way it's not possible all right so we are unfortunately almost coming to the end of our time already um there are well too many questions in the chat that i'm going to be able to get to but i do want to um go one round around the table here with a with a wrap-up question and give everybody a minute and a half to try to to try to wrap up all of the great thoughts um in for every time so um in the spotlight talk darin told us or suggested that we are decades beyond urgency in addressing the orbital debris challenge um so in a minute and a half or so what is the immediate next step that we must take to start addressing that urgency to start solving that that that gap so um just go around um i will pick on uh charity to start let's see at the bottom of the screen see if you can place it sure um i i think that's a great approach you know a lot of folks are thinking of active debris removal of you know it's decades away and we have time but we don't have time so what can we do now right right now uh and then what do we build on uh to get ready so i i really think domestic national priority on space environment management active debris removal whatever you want to call it make it a priority make it a statement and and have that drive the discussions of who owns it how are you going to fund their r&d uh aspects to it how are we going to develop the ppp and the economic models how are we going to do the international pieces but it all starts with you know laying down the policy so get the policy right luke well there's not much to add to what charity just said that's uh i think for us we see it exactly the same way i think governments have to to lead the to to lead the first efforts is in europe it's already the case i think he's demonstrates that uh today there's more european uh agencies that are starting looking into that so so this is moving in japan as well and i think this should be a global effort there's another dimension is really this dimension of building up international collaboration to address uh to address those problems and that's something that has to be driven probably with a very similar model that what has been done for for the iss glalia you're next on my screen so i think in my opinion that i'm a researcher so what is my my job is to to understand the different solution that we have on the table so and we discussed the different solution about the ppp solution but if we go through this way uh we have to think about if there is a market to sustain these ppp model and to understand how the business model of active debris removal is based on is based on to give profit to private sector or to save the profits so this is a distinction that is important to understand how to develop a sustainable business model of the active debris removal so this is the first um i think that that uh i wanted to share with you but the second thing is that if it's not sustainable so if it's not sustainable the ppp model of it is not sustainable to think about is the if the market can have the incentive economic incentive to solve this problem alone for sure we need the intervention of legislation so and to think about if we need for budding legislative intervention or if we need the other solution for example to pay a fee so each satellite operator pay a fee in order to invest in in this kind of technical solution so depends on the risk as i said before if the risk is now or if the risk is a long term and then to position an intervention on the public and private sector in different ways along this timeline asha last word great um so i'm gonna give two since i have a last word um one is i really do think we have to develop these these risk and cost benefit models that clearly is talking about and and develop them in a holistic way that's transparent and people buy into so i think we really need the evidence behind whatever next steps are going to take i would say secondly and i do not speak on behalf of anybody i speak on behalf of myself and representing you know the science technology policy institute i do not represent the u.s government here but i do think that the us is losing an opportunity to get in on in terms of technology development in adr technology and to to help um to both look at their own missions as uh as an example of a customer to use these technologies down the line but also to drive to buy down risk and try and better understand some of the challenges that we have on the policy side on some of the concerns we have on the legal and policy side and work that out it it can't we can't admire the problem so much more unless we go forward and do it and in order to do it we need action from at least in the u.s we do need some direction on which agency is going to take the lead in doing it and who's going to be funded to do it all right so thank you all um so you know to to activate active debris removal we need uh we need to know that governments must act we need to get environmental management space environmental management policy in place international cooperation it was essential we have some models that we can consider for that the iss cooperation public private partnerships uh then we really need to understand what the technical and cost benefit risks and analyses are uh in sustainable active debris removal businesses models and the uh the overall risk portfolio in orbit um and we have to look for opportunities for leadership and we need a u.s government um champion to step up and and take this responsibility so uh very simple straightforward steps that we need to do but i'm sure that uh i'm sure that we have ample opportunities to continue this conversation and we've identified some good uh some good work to go forward so thank you to the panelists i wish we could keep talking thank you to the audience for the great for the uh the number of questions that were submitted uh again i wish we could get to them all but we certainly had a good discussion um i want to welcome my colleague uh crystal back uh up on stage our conference chair here to take us out for the day thank you all right well thank you ian and thank you again to all of our panelists from all three of our sessions today i really couldn't be happier with what we've been able to bring you with the discussions that we've had and with the opportunities for follow-up that this gives us so just to let you all know this is day one we're concluding now um starting tomorrow we're going to have another day of packed content for you uh two panels uh one on the space race or what we really should call it the second on the space force and what should be really focusing on what should be its prime directive and then i'm also incredibly pleased to offer you two keynotes one is an interview style keynote i was tori bruno from ula and one is batia law a senior advisor at nasa to hear a little bit about the biden administration's priorities on space sustainability so join us tomorrow if you know anyone else you'd like to invite please have them register and we are excited for our event to continue thank you so much


going to be our 20 participants also now. So we'll make a start. So hello to everybody who has joined us today and thank you all for taking time out on your Friday lunchtime to be with us as we dive into another of our HydroTerra webinar series today looking at the 101 on soil moisture monitoring, why and how we monitor soil moisture. So my name is Kyle McLaren. You should be quite familiar with my voice now if you've been with us before, but I'm the sales manager here at HydroTerra. It's my pleasure to welcome our guest speaker for today, which is Rob Guy, the sales and marketing manager from Centech. Rob is a hydro hydrologist and soil scientist by trade, having worked in hydrological modeling, agricultural and forestry research. Rob has managed the sales and marketing at Centech for over 11 years now with Centech now having distributors in over 40 countries, including ourselves and their relationship with Centech has been well over a decade now. So thanks Rob for joining us today. As always, we're also joined by Michelle Cantone, our senior monitoring consultant who's now based in Queensland, but still continues to provide support for myself on these webinars to ensure everything runs as smoothly as it can. So thanks Michelle for joining us as well and your ongoing support throughout all of our webinar series that we do. Our housekeeping for today is just the Q&A chat box on top of your screen. So as we move through this presentation, please feel free to write any questions you may have for Rob, almost self and as always, we'll leave a bit of time at the end and we'll tally these all to go through them all with you. So our program for today is I'll hand over to Rob in a second who will talk a little bit about the history of Centech and how they came to be and where they are now. We'll talk a little bit about why it's important to monitor soil moisture and what this soil moisture data can tell us. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the amount of data and information that can be from this as I certainly was when I first heard of these applications. Rob will also talk about how we go about the monitoring and where we think the technology might be best situated and finally a bit of the product overview of the Centech probes and the tools available in order for us to obtain this data as well as the as I mentioned the Q&A at the end there. But without further ado, I'd like to hand this over to Rob. So thanks very much, Rob. Thank you, Carl, and good, good afternoon. I wish everybody a messy and w a good morning. OK, just on as Carl was saying, starting off with the history of where we sit. And this is Peter Bust, who's the founder of Centech company back 30 years ago this month, actually. So we just had our 30th anniversary on the 12th of April. So founded in 1991 and 12th of April. And this is Peter with some of the first prototypes and really a brief history of it is that he was working out as an agronomist on neutron probes and really wanted to find a better way to do it. And he was working with all sorts of different ideas. And he just happened to meet up with a with Rick Gato, who was he had been working for British Aerospace. And Rick suggested, why don't we do this electronically? And it just coincided with a real time of the advent of development of some of the micro processes that allowed them to to to adopt and find chips that allowed them to measure very, very high frequencies and but using very low amplitude straw and measure some moisture that way. And it took them a couple of years to develop the the sensors and the frequency in order to measure at the right level without any interference. But they ended up with a highly scientific product with high resolution, which I'll cover later. And this is really one of the first prototypes. It doesn't look like anything like that now. But it's still those two brass capacitance rings using dielectric, using the dielectric content of constant of the soil and the change of it of the water in the soil and the salt is another application. And this was the first one run with car batteries and in the field and lunchboxes and all sorts of things. But this was the first prototype that was then shared with growers over a couple of years period until the adoption and the insights that they were getting were just so tremendous that that they said, we've got to start a company. And that was the dawn of Sentec and it's really grown and grown from there. And as Carl was saying, we now got offices in the US, then in Europe and we just expanding and our sales and and reach is just going, you know, we really at that exponential stage of growth, which is so great to see, not only with researchers, environmental monitoring, but also importantly in commercial agriculture. So we're a scientific grade measurement company, censoring company, but our main sales are actually into commercial agriculture. And I'll cover some of that later on or come apparent. OK, next slide. OK, and this is really some of that first applications. These are really old pictures. But because Peter came from that scientific agronomic background, he wanted everything validated with research papers, all science journal, all these other things, independent validation. And this is some work that was done in California, where the pros are actually installed in last semesters. So matching the actual measurement of the probe, the calibration of the probe was really important in order to not only be doing an electronic measurement, but translating that electronic measurement into volumetric ion content with calibration equations. And this is part of that work. Next slide. And this is the key team, Poltonian Star, which produced some of that really early, early work in the early 90s, I think, 1995 paper. It was one of the keystones of Centex credibility going into the market, enabling us to sell to researchers and then really just reference these independent papers that came up to say this technology really works and it is scientifically valid and you can use it in your research. Next slide. And this is really the early calibration equations that came out. And there's a foundation for the calibration equations in the Envirus scan probe, which we'll cover later. And if you have a look at this, the frequency or the relative frequency on the y-axis and the volumetric soil moisture on the x-axis. And if you see that little picture on the bottom left, you know, that represents the calibration site, one picture of a calibration site where various probes were installed at multiple depths and then ranges of water contents, which are reflected on that graph, were from very dry all the way through to moist, were simulated in different plots. And then gravametric sampling, as you can see in the top right with a little ring there, gravametric sampling was taken, which is the only standard for volumetric moisture. And then that was compared with that frequency at the time of sampling. And then obviously go to the oven way before in the oven, way after in the oven, you know, the volume of the soil and you can, you know, so you can calculate the bulk density and then calculate your volumetric soil content. And they ended up with this great relationship by combining a number of studies together, which included work in the US and DPI and Faro across a range of soils to produce a really robust calibration equation that really worked well across a range of soil types. And that default calibration equation is then written into the probe so that when the probe takes that that ionic measurement based on the dielectric of the soil water, it can be translated instantly by the board for you into a volumetric soil water content. But I'll show you later on that you can actually change this. So if you have a specific soil that doesn't really fit in or you want to change it, we have a whole library of calibration equations and even other ways of adjusting the data to match your specific site, as well as the facility for you to derive your own calibration equation and use that. So that's really great. And then just that bottom right graph showing that Beltsville, California, Australia, a whole lot of combined data that really fitted so well together with a great R squared value. So we're very, they were very, very happy at the time to be able to launch this as not only a scientifically valid but highly practical tool that gave volumetric soil water content. Next slide, Carl. So what does that enable us to do? OK, so the first insight is this is one of the graph. This is a graph of soil moisture data, and it just shows some of the commonly measured parameters that traditionally one would have to get from by doing a whole lot of laboratory work and determining field capacities and wilting points and onset of wilting and plant available water and readily available water, all these things that traditionally we go and measure. And of course, that's the way to do it. Valid the in the laboratory through suction plates and measurements, whereas the probe actually tells us. So provided you've got a calibrated probe that matches that salts up, you can actually use your probe to determine this is the first of the insights, your actual soil water property. So on the X axis, you have time. OK, and on the Y axis is the soil water content. Now, this particular graph is what we call a sun graph. So it's adding up all the senses in the profile. So our senses can measure every 10 centimetres down a profile all the way down. You'll see we've got some really deep ones later on. But if you add up all the senses in the profile, you can make a sun graph. Now, the colour coding on this is very simple. Blue means too much water, red means too little water and green means you got it. OK, so this picture here is really showing how if you're starting from the left before the 4th of February, there's some irrigation or rain came in. And initially we over the threshold. And the reason we know we over the threshold from a patent point of view is that we're using our plant as the actual sensor. So the extraction pattern of the plant as it draws water is actually telling us about the soil properties in the soil and how the plant is reacting to them, which is all about what the stress points are. So you can see initially it's irrigated in there. And then these little small steps and those steps, if you're not familiar with that, are the day, night steps.  So it's not it's horizontal in the daytime. It's vertical. And the size of those steps reflects the evapotranspiration of the plant. Now, what we've determined and all these by looking at these graphs and saying, what on earth does all this mean is that when you've got a small step, the plant is not transpiring for some reason. And so in the reflection of the non-transpiration is that you're not getting that change in moisture content to the same degree. So initially in that blue zone, we're talking about very small steps because we're actually short of air. So the plant's got an aeration problem, and that's also causing stomach to close down, affecting photosynthesis. And then as it dries down and you actually get to that field capacity, which is defined as that real, nice balance of air and water after soils train to a point of major potential kind of equaling your gravity pool, we've got that really nice steps that are day, night, day, night, day, night, pulling down at a maximum pull until you get to a point where suddenly the plant cannot pull. It's pulling at different levels all the way through the profile as the water is available, satisfying evaporative demand. And then it gets to a point where it can't pull anymore and it starts slowing down and you're starting to lose yield at that time or gain quality, which we'll cover later. And then you move to a point where you're obviously going to a permanent wilting point position. So wow, that only show that shows you your field capacity can show you your saturation point for your soil, can show you your onset of wilting, which is like an F factor, which is all we say. Oh, well, F factor of a cactus is a lot higher than an X factor for a lettuce and all this is written in textbooks and we we do estimates based on rainfall. You can just observe it by using your probe. So in this, there's your onset of stress as your F factor. And then you're moving down to your actual permanent wilting point of your soil. So and then from that, practically, from a farming point of view, not only do you know your plant available water, which is all the water available to the plant, sometimes readily, sometimes not, but you can define the green zone. That is your readily plant available water content, which in the 101 of irrigation management is keep it in the green. You let the plant tell you what's happening and keep him healthy or her and keep her here or him in the green. And you go for your maximum yield and water efficiency at that level. OK, next slide. OK, and how do we know? Whoops, how do we know how well that works? And this is just to illustrate that if we look, don't worry about the blue graph for now. That is really just a bar graph reflecting the land graph below. So just to exactly the same, those steps are reflected in the blue graph. The next graph down is your ET measured by your weather station. So your evaporative demand. So just a simple example from real data. Showing the day, the ET rising, rising, rising. So day one at six point six, day two at seven, day three at seven, day four, seven point six, day five, seven point six. And you can see how that reflects really well in the pattern of the green lines below. So you can see that increase in evaporation extraction of the plant based on the ET. So it's in a perfect zone for the for the in terms of soil water content between field capacity and waltzing point for the plant to be operating maximum. And depending on the ET, it's it's actually reflecting the amount of evaporation taken on that day. OK, so that's really kind of neat to see. OK, next slide. OK, then what do we do from a practical point of view when you irrigating all the graphs I've shown you up to now have been what we call the summed graph, OK, which is what I said before. It's the addition of all the senses in the profile, giving us the overall health of our entire root zone. But that's not the full picture. What one has to understand is we have to understand each layer of the soil. OK. So it's really important. We want to know where did the water go? How much water is at each level? Did we waste water is the plant? Where's the plant drawing from? How much is it drawing from each layer? How dense are the roots? You know, all these things that again, we used to guess or used to use best scientific research knowledge, digging roots and measuring them again. We can just observe the data and we can determine it. So each of those line graphs there from the red, blue, black, their pink down to the green, they all different layers in the soil. So the top one is near the surface, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 centimetre, for example, that would be that would be the root. So each of those graphs is on exactly the same scale, but we stack, we call a stack graph, so we stack them one above the other. So it's like looking at your soil profile from the side and looking how each layer is working with again, your time on the X axis. So you can see in the beginning, lots of irrigations and you can see those irrigations are not not going to where you have roots, because if you look at the shape of each graph, you can see if they've got steps or not. And if it doesn't have steps, the roots on there. OK. And so initially, there's a lot of irrigation going down all the way down to that green zone without there being roots there. It doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing because this also comes into irrigation scheduling. Lates on in the season, you might not even have enough water application rate to supply your roots.  You want to fill your profile up even below the root zone so that later on, when your evaporative demand is crazy, you can actually mine that water from the bottom because you just can't supply at the rate that's required. And that's very common. So there's a lot of sometimes it can be an over irrigation and you've wasted water in fertilizer. Sometimes it's good management. And that depends on what what your crop is, what your planning is. So there's a lot of interaction needed between the agronomists. Really, you need good agronomists and they can use this data and really add value to the irrigation system. And as you see, it's not only about yield and water efficiency, it's about quality to and we'll get to that. OK, so and you can see after a little while at that first little blue arrow, the roots have now developed at that third level. So we now know we've got roots there. We can happily keep replenishing that area. And as we go on in time, you can see the steps get bigger and bigger at each of those layers that develops roots. And that is a measurement of the root development at that site. And interestingly enough, from a research point of view, we sell a lot of probes to genetic breeders because instead of having to go and measure where the roots are and prove where your roots are, they actually use the probes to track their roots. So they put a raise of probes, not only one probe in a profile, but multiple probes all the way around the plant. And by using wetting and drying cycle to various times in the season, they're actually able to determine the capacity for each layer to withdraw water and so quantify using the soil water extraction as a surrogate to quantify the actual root density in a whole array in a three-dimensional plot around the plant. So that's fantastic work. And we've had and then people do it for all sorts of reasons, not only genetics, you might have a soil ameliorant. You want to test different tillage methods to see how wide your soils go sideways. Whether you've got compaction problems. So agronomists also use it as a problem solving tool. So we introduce what we call it the Sentech toolkit. And so you use multiple probes and put them out in arrays, setting out from the plant until you can actually solve a problem and see where's my water going? Where isn't it going? Oh, my roots getting there. Am I wasting water down in the furrow and not enough getting into the mound when you're growing potatoes, etc. That the opportunities are endless. OK, thank you. Next slide. Another thing that people get out of it is the effective rainfall. It's one thing having a rain gauge, which is obviously a great tool and we love rain gauges in conjunction with what we measure. But actually what you're interested in from a agriculture or even resource or research, what is actually going into the soil? So because the sense is actually measure at 10 centimetre depth, you know, not to 10 centimetre depth, you're not measuring what's lying in puddles on the soil or getting intercepted by the plants and evaporating. You're actually measuring the amount that went into the soil. And in this particular case, the irrigations were in pink on that biograph at the top and the rainfall in blue. You can actually see by looking at that thing with all the question marks there that five millimetres of rain had little impact. So really it's a bit like when you're trying to measure your how much water you can capture in your rainwater tank off your roof. Traditionally, you just just regard first two millimetres and this is similar, but you can actually quantify it for your soil if you have a rain gauge or you know exactly how much actually went into your soil. It's, you know, academic interest to know what fell. But what you really want to know is what is in my soil for my plants to use? Okay, next question. Next slide. And a practical application of this is an example under a center pivot where a person had so many problems. He really had problems and he was battling to meet the demand. He didn't build his reservoir up and up enough at the bottom of the profile, like we were talking about earlier and he just couldn't get the water in. And he was putting his pivot on faster and faster and faster trying to get the water in. But as we saw in the last slide, your efficiency goes down because every pivot application loses water to interception and puddling on the surface and evaporation. So you have to be counterintuitive and actually slow his pivot down, get the water into the soil so that he could then get to the point of recovery. And you can see how it was only on about the 14th of April there that he's actually managed to penetrate in and after that period of stress to actually start that green level just started to rise and the next level is starting to rise. And you can see this more clearly on the next slide, which is the same data observed with the sun graph. So next slide, please. Okay, and this is the same data, that same little period is a box there. And this is a sun graph where we added them all together. So you see initially wildly going with lots of pivot speed, just but he can't keep up. The soil moisture is just going down, down, down. He loses that lots of money in that period just before the 7th of April to about the 14th of April. And believe me, that is a lot of money. Every day costs you money. And then he managed to slow his pivot down and he built up his soil moisture and from then on, he was able to maintain it again. And so they're very practical application of just knowing where your water is and tying it in with your agronomic practices, looking back at your data, reflecting, what am I doing wrong? Must I take my tillage? Must I change my soil moisture? Should I mulch this season? All these questions and answers you can get and the probes just sort out that black box under the ground that you really don't know what's happening. And those dynamics are really important. It's one thing to garden the soil and take a sample and feel it, but by having the probe measuring it constantly for you, they're telling you all sorts of things that are happening. Okay, next slide. Again, water tables, lots of problems with that. Okay, so what happens is after over time, you can develop a water table. So you over irrigate and you develop a water table. Now, water tables are really bad news.  Okay, if for future years, you just can salemize your soil with over irrigation, big, big challenge. And of course, more practically from season to season, you get all sorts of phytophoras and root diseases by sitting in water logging in the soil. Now, again, as we saw from that first slide, as soon as a layer starts flatlining, and if you have a look at the number, if you can just see it on the left in that bottom pane, it says 45.9%. So I know that that is not stress. If it was down at 12, I would know that it's flatlined because of stress, but I know it's 45.9. Okay, which is definitely a saturated soil. So you use the numbers as well as the pattern of the graph to determine what's going on. And why, gosh, have you got a water table forming there? Then after a while, either it was rain or we stopped irrigating with something and it drew all the way down again. And then the bad practices started all over again and he over irrigated with look, definitely looks like irrigations. You can actually see the difference between irrigation and rain. Irrigation is a sharp curve going up. You get a sharp spark because it's applied and stopped. Rain tends to drift in and out. And as you know, hard and soft. So you get a bit more of a wavy increase. So those are irrigations and he's over irrigating, causing water tables and various times, but hopefully after October in that example, he improved his laugh and went on. If you haven't looked, this data is really old. This is from 1995. So this is data from the first year of applications. And so these insights have been available. Okay, next slide. Okay, just from a final example here, this is, and there's lots more. They saw water dynamics. And some of these are from an environmental point of view is like, this is a particular problem that one client had. They needed to prove to the EPA, according to their license that they weren't leaching this contaminated water that they were dosing and putting lots of calcium in to prevent a double layer effect on their nut on the lots of sodium in the soil, but they still had to prove that they weren't leaching any of this, a certain, I think of above 2.5% water application rate was allowed into the root zone. So what they had to do is make sure that they irrigating, and if they anticipating rain, you irrigate to a deficit so that the soil can still buffer and absorb the rain and you're not washing down into the groundwater, but they had one sensor situated below at the bottom of the root zone. And so what we, in our software, you have the facility to actually plot that as not only a bar graph, I mean, as a land graph, but also as a bar graph. And in this case showing only the negative. So we're not plotting the positive where the graph goes up and the water goes in. We only potting extraction. And that extraction in this particular case shows the amount of water leaching below the profile. And so by putting a ruler at each end, we can quantify it and say, oh, okay, 41.84 millimeters of water multiplied by the area of your land is the volume of water that leached below your root zone and potentially down into the groundwater eventually out of this water, that's not very nice, but it might meet your EPA requirements or not, or you must improve your irrigation system or whatever it is, but there's a lot of insights that you can get from this and water balance calculations. And yeah, no great, you know, as you can lose your imagination, it goes on and on. Okay, next slide. Next slide. Okay, this one is a fantastic study and it was almost a mistake for it to get the really nice information that we got out of it. On the right-hand side, you can see a catchment which is in, this is on the east coast of the United States. There's a catchment over there with a whole, just happened to have a range of soil types. And because what the, it was a USDA, there were non-research organizations, the US Department of Agriculture, NASA was involved. It was all about satellite tracking and looking at subsurface water flow and everything. And they put in, I think they've been total of 48 probes down to depth with, you know, quite deep as well. And they put every, they started the probe so that every change of soil type had a probe that represented that soil type. And then they monitored it for three seasons and they got what they wanted out of it. And then Peter, our founder, said, what about this? Go to the next slide. Okay, what he did is he identified the amounts of time and he counted the number of days that each probe spent in either the blue zone or the red zone and called those stress zones. So every day that the soil moisture content wasn't in that optimum green zone, he counted as a stress day. And then they harvested the corn over three years around each probe and worked out what the yield was and it's in bushels on the left-hand side. I counted the Y axis in bushels because it's in the US. And then they plotted the number of stress days and it came up with really groundbreaking insights is you could actually start to quantify what every day of mismanagement actually costs you in terms of money and corn by looking at those three seasons, which happened to be a wet season, a medium season and a dry season, which worked out really well, plotted the graph, great relationship. And you can see that, for example, in this particular case, 15 days of not getting your irrigation right actually costs you 50% of your potential yield on that side. We're not getting your water right. But even a few days, even one or two days costs you a significant amount by axis, agriculture, who have say, it costs you 100 bushels per acre to grow your crop. That's your cost. So your profit is, for example, potentially up to 60 bushels. Now, if you even do it badly for two or three days, you might lose 20 bushels. So you might have only lost, say, whatever that is, 8% of your yield, but you've lost 33% of your profit. Because it costs you 100 bushels just to pay for the crop. And this is applicable to whatever you're talking about, potatoes, whatever it is. And when I get to the data, which I will do in a minute, some live data, on our Euromax live platform, which is all the software which is practically used from a research and a commercial point of view, I will show you, and it's an example in McClarenvale from integrated precision viticulture, operates in that region, that the quality is really important. So sometimes you not only wanna keep it in the green, sometimes you ride that red line in order to induce different qualities. And again, those qualities are not only about grapes, they can be anything. They can be avocados, they can be nuts, they can be wheat, they can be anything where you're trying to control proteins or sucrose or the size, even sugarcane. There are certain times when you actually don't wanna overwater the crop because they can't get the right balance of nutrients or size. Sometimes a supermarket just pays you more or a potato chipping machine wants a higher percentage of a particular size crop. And that's getting on to 102, 103 honors. Okay, once you can start doing that. So without further ado, I can shift over and get on to that soon. So next slide. Oh, sorry, I won't get on to that. Oh, sorry, I gotta get on to the products. I'm a bit running behind time. So this is the first one, the Enviroscan. Click on Sensor, still widely used, measuring every 10 centimeters into the soil, particularly deep crops. And you can either send it by telemetry or you can manually download the data. Next slide. Okay, then we of course developed the TriScan data which allows us to use multiple second frequency to also get an indication of salinity in the soil. So we could also do that at every depth. Okay, next slide. And of course, these ones can go really deep. So this is a 50 meter probe, for example, that goes really, really deep in the botanical gardens and in Melbourne. And this is an example of installing that. And we've got all sorts of environmental and research and hydrological studies that measure all the way down through the VATOS zone. Next slide. Okay, now final production that we recent product is the Drill and Drop. So again, the Drill and Drop can plug into all sorts of telemetry be it our own or third party telemetry. But what's clever about it is that it's a fully encapsulated probe so that there's no chance of water getting in. And the very clever part of it is that it's actually a tapered probe. Okay, so the probe is actually tapered and we can send the video of it being installed later on. But it's a tapered probe.  Okay, very importantly, tapered. So it's slightly thicker at the top than it is at the bottom. It tapers by one millimeter per foot. You drill that hole and then you can push that probe into the soil and wedge it into shape. And that gives a tart fit, as you can see where we've cut away the profile here and you measure directly into the profile without any air gaps and importantly, no disturbance to the soil. So the dynamics that you're measuring at each level, the field capacity, the welding point is specific to that. We do not use any slurry if possible. And then just on the right hand side, we also have a Bluetooth option where the date is collected and logged on the probe and you can come and collect it with your phone and you can collect multiple data from multiple probes on your phone. And that's proven to be really popular with researchers with lots of little plots. They don't have to have any telemetry on that and they can just use their telephone and it goes straight to the software from their nurseries as well. Use that and vegetable crops where you have lots and lots of change over and you need to pull in and out the probes, no cables, no hassle. Okay, probably just go to the next slide, Carl. And just to show you the importance of the undisturbed installation, the top graph is a proper installation and the bottom graph is a slurry installation where you've actually mixed up soils, mixed up soil and water, you've made a sloppy mixture and you've pushed the sensor down. Not only does that mean that you can't use that data for a long time before it's stabilized, it also means that the data is not real, the infiltration rate's not real, you've messed up the structure, the texture, the textural changes, all those dynamics of field capacity and melting point which are individual to each horizon have all been mixed up into one slushy thing. So it's not representative on the soil. So really important, we really advocate a direct install and what's great about it is that a direct install is so fast. You don't have to carry buckets of water, sieve soil, mix it all up, you just go in, drill the hole, take it out, literally in as easy soil it can be in minutes. We've installed 72 once in Florida, it was a sandy site but we did it in one day in a trial. Putting drilling the hole, literally 30 seconds in the sand, not always, sometimes it takes us quite a few minutes if it's a clay and it's steep. And then you've created that slightly tapered hole, you wedge it and push it in part against the side it's installed. And then extraction is also easy if you have to extract it because you just break the seal and then because of the taper, it pulls out easily. You don't have to pull, pull, pull, pull, pull all the way down. Okay, next slide. Okay, and I'll switch to the Eramax Live presentation. So I'm gonna share my screen now. And if you can see my screen now, this is a typical dealer site and this is in McClainville, as I said, they are kindly shared by RPV there. They have got hundreds down in the site there. And this is why I chose these examples and got permission from George to do it, is that we have, is that they great users in the Shiraz of deliberately stressing the plant. So without further ado, I'll show you some of the data. So this is far, this particular one, the map shows you the percentage. So this is showing it's in the green, all these ones are in the green. These ones are in the yellow zone, which means you can also define a yellow zone between the green and the red to warn you that they're in the yellow zone, but actually they deliberately in the yellow zone as I'll click. So if you wanna have a look at your data, a grower could, for example, just log into this site. He sees all his probes. You can quickly look and say, okay, those ones are in the green, that's all fine. Oh, this one's in the yellow. There's only 5% left. Let me click on it. A little mini graph comes up and he clicks on that graph. It actually loads it. And now you can see this case, both of the types of graphs together. The top graph showing each layer and the bottom one showing the sum of each layer. And you can see how it drew down at this case. And so very importantly, pre-Verazon, here in the August to October period, you don't want any stress on this plant. The berries are forming. You don't wanna mess up your cell division. Everything must be good. Okay? Then, what does he draw? Brings his soil moisture down into that period between December and April where he's actually, the berries are ripening now and you wanna get that strong Charaise flavor. So you, but you don't wanna lose yield. So you're riding in that yellow zone and he seems to be improving. Like that year he kinda got it. This year he's being a little bit more adventurous and stressing a little bit more because he's going for maybe a little bit higher quality. He probably got himself up a grade in premium by through that last summer season, this summer season, he's saying, okay, I can probably take a little bit further. And you know, his wine maker's saying, I need something, a more actinous mass than activity, more hormones that are changing the flavor of the wine to get up to a $50 bottle. And he's riding that line. And so that's an example of a typical Charaise, what we call regulated deficit irrigation management. And of course, the grower can do what he likes. You can zoom in. If I just click on the graph, it zooms in on a period. You can put predictors that tell you about when you miss next irrigate. And there are all sorts of other functions. We can place rulers like we saw before on the graph. I wanna actually see what my moisture content is there. Just after I irrigate it, I put a ruler there and it'll tell me my moisture content at that site. And what else do I wanna do? I can put comments on. So I can put comments on the graph so I can communicate with my grower or my grower can communicate with me.  And those comments can be positioned anywhere on the graph. You can change the colors thresholds there. And you can have different growth stages. So different periods of time. You might wanna guard them to be irrigating at different times. And importantly, as I said before, you can add paints. So if you've got a weather station or other data, you can actually bring it in above or below that. You can copy paints and put them in with other graphs. And importantly, as I mentioned before, you can also do data adjustment. So for example, on this one, you might say, ah, I'm not really happy with that. I don't think that reflects my field properly. I wanna try another calibration equation. You can try them, particularly sometimes in very heavy clays or large sands. The default might not work perfectly for what you want. And you try it out. I'm not gonna do it because I don't wanna mess up with George's data now. Okay, so yeah. And so just that's a brief overview of what you can do, but practically used in research, great insights, environmental applications for policy, for meeting legislative requirements. And obviously, widely, widely in commercial, irrigated agriculture, but actually increasingly even dry land too, to making decisions on whether you put a top dressing on or doing infield trials. And there's a lot of that going on too. So I was just on the air peninsula, they're probably about 60, 70 probes there alone on this kind of thing. So yeah, so lots and lots of insights. And that's it for me. Thank you very much. Okay. Thanks, Ram. I'll just get back to the presentation here. And we'll open it up for any questions that you might have regarding that. Feel free to type in the Q and A box. We had a couple of questions come through already prior to this webinar. So I might start off with those and give some people some time if they'd wish to type anything that they'd like to ask. So the first question, Rob, was asked if there was any technology available to undertake soil moisture reading without direct contact with the soil? No, we required, you have to have direct contact. And as I said, we have an installation method which we really spent a lot of time on and patents on in order to make sure that we could drill a hole and both the invalids scan and the drill and drop which is easier to do to ensure using that taper or by drilling through the tube which is a bit more complicated method on the invalids scan that we have an underserved installation with the plastics on the outside of the actual probe in direct contact with the soil so that you can measure because the electric field has to pass through the plastic into the soil and you do need direct contact. We do not have an indirect contact method of doing that at all. You need direct contact in order for the waves to work. Yep. Okay, yep. Another one was technology available which can produce instant reading of soil moisture and be linked to a comms unit for remote relay. Yep, absolutely. So we have so many options on that. We have, and I didn't really get into all the ways the data can be transmitted, but we have logging probes where obviously we always translate to soil moisture content on the probe using the calibration equation which is written into the circuit board. Then we have various options on some of our own Cintiq solutions which can be provided through dealers, Harjo-Terra. They, that pool will in itself wake up a modem and transmit the data and that's you can set to how often you want. So most commonly in agriculture people don't need the data instantly. They would, you know, they're looking a few times a day so they might log a few readings before they activate them, before they program, that's all pre-programmed. The probe is activated to open the modem say after every three readings, open the modem, transmit the data to live where we saw it on that graph example. Otherwise, but you can do that. You can read as often as you like and transmit as often as you like. That's up to you and up to your data plan. That's really just a practical amount of data you want and how often you want it is purely up to the user to send. And that can be programmed. Secondly, we also have third party compatible probes. So they probes can be Modbus or SDR-12 which plug into a huge range of loggers and controllers and anything. And of course they can be programmed to read instantly and send the data, display the data, operate control systems, whatever you want. So that's, so we completely compatible with a whole range of other people, whether it be, you know, radio networks, controllers, loggers, other cellular, satellite telemetry solutions, it can be done. And, you know, and of course the final way is the manual upload, which I mentioned with the Bluetooth probe again, this data, you can stand there and have a probe uploading that, a soft phone upload, so in a greenhouse you could potentially have that setting. We haven't had anyone do it yet, but I did speak to the engineers, it is possible for it to set on auto upload on a phone. So if you could have your phone, really want a little bit kind of a hack method. Yep, yep, and I suppose the integration piece of those sensors into third party systems is something that, as well as, and if Robert, have you noticed temperature data, if so? Ah, thank you for that question. That's a, I should have mentioned that actually, our drill and drop probes, they always measure moisture and temperature, okay? And optionally salinity. So we have two types, either the moisture probe, which measures moisture and temperature or moisture temperature and salinity on the trial scan probe. Now we have a temperature correction factor built in like any electronic equipment, be it an EC meter or whatever, they've all got the little temperature things in there because the electronics heats up, the soil heats up, and you have to compensate for that. So we do have a compensation built in through the, by using the actual temperature, which is also measured in the probe. So not only do you get soil temperature, but you also, it's also used as a temperature compensation to deal with that. And sometimes there are circumstances, you've got funny soils, there's an infinite number of soils out there where that doesn't quite work and you're still seeing a temperature effect. Well, you can actually calibrate it for that soil. You can either do it with the way I was showing you the change in the calibration equation can make an adjustment there at the post-processing stage or you can actually do it in the probe. So each probe can actually, you can log into the probe before you set it up and change what we call the deco-efficient. So the ABC coefficients are that curve that's translating scale frequency into moisture. The de-factor is the temperature compensation. We have a default one in there, but that's also manually adjustable if you wanna go to the process of doing it for your specific soil. Thank you. Yep, excellent. Just have another one here from Kel Bulldoch. Thanks for joining us, Kel. In the deep profiles discussed, has the installation of probes been preceded by soil profile sampling and physical moisture analysis of profile layers? Interest is in profiles five to eight meters deep in forest areas. Yes, that would be, we would, that would be fantastic if people do that. There'd be a huge range of research, people that have done it. A lot of time, I mean, we would certainly encourage that for them to actually take proper core samples while they're doing the drilling of the hole. We'd have to look through papers to be honest. I can make a note of that and see through discussion papers and you can just Google Sentech Deep Soil Moisture Monitoring and see who's actually taken samples. We certainly done it for a couple of private jobs. They're probably not gonna have published that data because a lot of the people that do environmental work, mining companies and people disposing of the water, they don't make that data publicly available. But if it's a researcher that's published it, there would certainly be that data of, you know, actually determining in the lab the data and then they can cross correlate and calibrate the probe themselves. And that's certainly been done by people but I'd have to find the exact papers. Yep. Thanks for that. Any other questions that anybody wishes to ask? With those. I don't see any more coming through. But thank you to those that have provided the questions through. If there's no further questions, we might wrap that up there. So once again, thanks for taking the time out today. And also a big thank you to Rob for your insight on the soil moisture monitoring there and a view from Sentec. So thanks a lot, Rob, for that. If you wish to have any more questions that you might think of after the fact, be sure to send me an email here in the details provided on the screen. And if there's something specific in terms of research or a more technical aspect, I can certainly provide through Rob's details also. So without further ado, thank you very much, everybody and have a great day and really appreciate your time here today. So thanks, Rob, for joining us. Thank you.