Portugal Space and CNES show the French and Portuguese coastlines in Guimarães

Through the images captured by the satellites GEOSAT-2, from the Portuguese company Geosat, and Pléiades, from the Airbus, the exhibition “The French and Portuguese coasts under the watchful eye of satellites” allows a journey through 22 geographical points. The panels show the beauty and peculiarity, from space, of places like Peniche, Aveiro, Mont Saint-Michel or La Camargue, but also Guimarães and Bordeaux, the two cities that will host the exhibition under the Saison Croisée Portugal-France 2022. 

The exposition will open in the city of Guimarães next Monday, March 14th. The 22 panels with satellite images will be exposed outdoors, on the Plataforma das Artes e da Criatividade, until May 10th. In the meantime, on April 4th, Bordeaux will open the same exhibition, fulfilling the purpose of the Saison Croisée: a continuous and reciprocal cultural and scientific exchange between Portugal ad France. The exhibition is organized by the Portuguese Space Agency – Portugal Space and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales – CNES. In Portugal, the exhibition has the support of the Municipality of Guimarães.   

“For the Portuguese Space Agency, it makes perfect sense to embrace this initiative with CNES. The commitment to the potential of Earth observation services is critical in the Portugal Space 2030 strategy: we want to promote the use of Earth observation data by Portuguese companies and researchers so that, in this way, the necessary circumstances are created for the development of applications that are at the service of society”, explains the president of the Portuguese Space Agency, Ricardo Conde. 

The Science and Education Officer at the Portuguese Space Agency, Marta Gonçalves, notes that data and satellite images also allow “studying the impact of human actions and climate change on the environment”. Marta Gonçalves, responsible for Portugal Space projects linked to the Saison Croisée, explains that “in this exhibition, each panel contains, in addition to the image, a small descriptive and explanatory text about the coastline in question. For this, we had the help of researchers from several Portuguese universities and research centres, who have written about the challenges that those landscapes face these days”, she adds. 

In addition, those who visit the exhibition and want to find out more about any of the places illustrated in the 22 panels can do so through the QR Codes present on the panels, redirecting them to a page full of information. 

For the President of the Municipality of Guimarães, Domingos Bragança, the proposal by the Portuguese Space Agency and CNES for the exhibition to take place in Guimarães is a clear sign that the work that the municipality has carried out in the context of environmental sustainability and on the scientific system has not gone unnoticed. Furthermore, Domingos Bragança recalls that, soon, the city will have a new academic offer, with the start of the new Aerospace Engineering course at the University of Minho. A new educational offer that, according to the Mayor, will reinforce the commitment to knowledge in the space area and data science, which will support Guimarães’ status as a “University City”. 

 The exhibition “The French and Portuguese coasts under the watchful eye of satellites” is one of the joint projects of Portugal Space and CNES throughout this season, which runs until October 2022. Recently, the two space agencies inaugurated the Spatiobus route, a bus that, until March 25th, takes the space to eight cities in the Portuguese countryside.