An app that uses satellite data to evaluate the quality of wine took home the top prize at this year’s Space App Camp at ESA’s centre in Frascati, Italy.

In its fifth year, the App Camp offered access to the latest space data to app developers, who work to make the information accessible to a broad audience.

As Europe’s Copernicus programme continues to launch the Sentinel satellites, transforming their information into useful products poses both a challenge and an opportunity.

The week-long ‘camp’ culminated today with presentations of the seven projects to a jury, followed by a presentation by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano.

The winning Saturnalia app allows users to scan a bottle of wine and displays the best year for that particular wine based on Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and meteorological data providing soil, atmosphere and weather information. The app also recommends wines cultivated in similar conditions.

By integrating Copernius data, Saturnalia can also help wine investors and distributors to predict the quality of the wine prior to bottling, allowing them to buy the wine in advance and at a lower price.

Winning team’s members:
Daniele De Vecchi, Samuel Harrison, Ian Newson, Nick Read

The following other app concepts were developed:

The AirQ Sentinel application is a crowdsourcing app with gamification for discovering and confirming air pollution sources with the use of atmospheric satellite data. Users can choose from different types of missions which aim to raise the awareness of air pollution and its sources in an innovative way.

Team members:
Rafal Hazan, Piotr Krol, Witold Sieñski, Michal Siwko

The ATM LO team’s innovative app helps to provide banks with the service of the perfect location for ATMs in regards to minimising air conditioning costs. Thereby, the app uses Copernicus Sentinel data, such as land surface temperature values to find the best spot for more eco-friendly ATMs.

Team members:
Alberto Cantallops, Xavier Perarnau, Javier Ramos, Daniel Viaño

City Vibes is the smart application that helps urban people to focus on the parts of town which match their personal priorities best. The creative and forward-thinking application uses Sentinel data in combination with other traditional data sources.

Team members:
Isaac Besora, Stuart Kent, Tom Quast, Anthony Thomas

IceKing is the innovative application that makes touristic trips to glaciers a real adventure, helps scientists and aims at saving glaciers at the same time. The app uses Sentinel-1 SAR data, Sentinel-2 multispectral data and Ramani Map API, in order to offer a pioneering service that enables expiation-like trips for tourists and raises the awareness for climate change and an eco-friendly lifestyle.

Team members:
Marco Di Tullio, Giorgio Savastano, Gabriele Mamoli, Fabiana Milza

Do you think about safety during travelling? Then take a close look at SafeAdviser – the application that provides you with safety information for your travel destination. The pioneering app combines various open-data sources with Sentinel data, in order to provide its users with the best safety-related content for travelling.

Team members:
Kristaps Bunts, Linda Kimeisa, Karlis Laspins, Pavels Petrovs

Ever asked yourself about proper skin protection for staying in the sun? The SAP team’s application Zuvi combines inputs of atmospheric satellite data from the ESA Copernicus programme, meteorological data from Aerosol Robotic Network, local GPS information and skin-type data, in order to show its users the exact amount of time that they are able to stay in the sun protected without risking any damages to their skin.

Team members:
Josua Geiger, Sven Kuntner, Robin Reeb, Steffen Wieprecht