TerraSip

The Problem

Three days into a mountain hike, your water is gone. The stream ahead looks perfect, but is it safe? Agricultural runoff, recent floods, or invisible algal blooms could make it toxic—and you have no way to know. 

This is the reality for millions of outdoor enthusiasts. Traditional solutions are inadequate: bottled water is heavy and wasteful, filters miss chemical toxins, and "gut feeling" is dangerous. The irony? Copernicus satellites already monitor every water body on Earth, detecting contamination and algal blooms in real-time. This data is free and constantly updated, yet it remains inaccessible to the person standing at the water's edge. 

Today’s satellite tools are built for researchers with high-tech software, not for hikers who need an answer in five seconds, sometimes without an internet connection. TerraSip bridges this gap, translating orbital intelligence into life-saving insights at the point of need.

Our Solution

The App

A mobile-first web application that uses Galileo GNSS to pinpoint your exact location, then cross-references it against the latest satellite-derived water quality data for nearby water bodies. The result is a simple, color-coded rating — Excellent, Good, Poor, or Unsafe — backed by a Water Quality Index computed from chlorophyll-a concentration, turbidity levels, dissolved organic matter, atmospheric pollution deposition, and precipitation anomalies. Users also see an interactive map of nearby sources, real-time contamination alerts, historical quality trends, and plain-language explanations of why a source is rated the way it is.

The Smart Bottle

A companion hardware device — a water bottle with an integrated Galileo GPS module, capacitive water sensor, and BLE transmitter built into a food-grade silicone cap. When you fill the bottle from any source, the sensor detects the water, the GPS tags your precise coordinates, and the bottle sends a query to your phone via Bluetooth. The app looks up the safety rating from pre-cached satellite data. No internet needed. No chemical test strips. Just fill, and know.

Offline-First Architecture

The heavy satellite processing happens before you leave, not when you need water. Before a trip, the app downloads a lightweight water risk map for your route or region (10–50 MB per area). On the road, the phone performs a local spatial query against the cached data using only Galileo positioning. The system works entirely offline, syncing fresh satellite passes opportunistically when connectivity returns.

Tools

• Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, Sentinel-5P via Copernicus APIs 
• C3S & CEMS for climate/flood data 
• Galileo GNSS for sub-meter positioning 
• Offline vector tiles (10–50MB/region) 
• ESP32 + u-blox GPS + BLE for smart bottle 
• WQI scoring engine (NDWI, chlorophyll-a, turbidity, CDOM, NO₂, precipitation anomaly