ESA Sponsorship

The NoR call aims to support research, development and pre-commercial users to innovate their working practices, moving from a data download paradigm towards a ‘bring the user to the data’ paradigm, considered essential for maintaining competitiveness of European data exploitation. The NoR Discover Portal provides an ever increasing portfolio of innovative operational platform and cloud services operated by actors from participating countries. Usage of these resources shall accelerate the achievement of scientific goals and the sharing of the results, or approach the digital information market quicker and in an easier sustainable way.

The NoR will provide successful applicants with a voucher for the selected services, allowing free-at-point-of-use consumption for research, product development and up to pre-commercial demonstration. Vouchers must not be used to support any commercial revenue flows.

Eligibility for awarding of vouchers

In principle any user can apply for ESA sponsoring of cloud resources through the NoR, for Research, Pre-commercial, Development and demonstration projects exploiting satellite-based EO data, that are not creating revenue.

Request procedure

To apply for an NoR Sponsorship to support a project, a user needs to go through the following steps:

Use the NoR Discovery Portal to review the available portfolio of resources and identify the most suitable solution
Go through the Pricing Wizard procedure using the link visible on the main page of the portfolio corresponding to the chosen provider
Select ESA sponsorship and complete form
Export the Sponsorship Request from the Wizard page, sign it and email it to the address NoR-Sponsorship-Requests@esa.int

Evaluation process

The proposals will be reviewed by a panel of reviewers who assess the merits of the proposed project against the following evaluation criteria:

Eligibility and priority of the applicant
Merits of the proposed projects and probability of follow-on
Appropriate and cost-efficient use of granted resources

Commitment and deliverables required from successful applicants

Any user who receives ESA NoR Sponsorship commits to: Reference NoR on any papers / presentations published inserting the text ‘Project supported by ESA Network of Resources Initiative’. Provide quarterly feedback information when requested by ESA on the users’ satisfaction with the sponsored service. Within two months of the end of the Sponsorship period, provide a set of slides highlighting the project achievements and informing NoR@esa.int.

Working days
(median)
for proposal
evaluation

NoR PORTFOLIO