With an area of more than 100km², the Sishen mine in South Africa is one of the largest open pit mines in the world. It’s dedicated to the excavation of iron ore, a basic element in the production of steel, which is important for civil engineering applications.
The mine is operated and owned by Kumba Iron Ore, a business unit of Anglo American, one of the world’s largest suppliers of high-quality iron ore to the global steel industry. Their activities are spread over Southern Africa, South America, Australia, North America, Asia and Europe including mining operations, growth projects, exploration and marketing activities.
The size of the area is a major challenge for the operator when it comes to daily decision making - and this is where Airbus Defence and Space's Stack Insight with its rapid delivery of up-to-date, accurate and highly detailed information comes into play.
Accurate and timely information is crucial for the Sishen’s mining and surveying team to review and plan activities - which implies decision making on a regular basis about new blasting and excavation sites, strategic equipment placement, material movement and waste dump locations.
Furthermore, Kumba needs to keep an eye on the environmental change and compliance.
Stack Insight is the world’s most uniquely accurate and advanced satellite-based change detection and remote volume calculation service for mining and civil engineering applications.
It offers the possibility to calculate the extracted volumes of piles and stacks of excavated material without sending staff on site. The high accuracy allows the South African company to identify and track even the smallest changes in its mines and to assess changing volumes on a regular basis.
"The weekly update issued by Airbus Defence and Space and Pinkmatter Solutions, which is not time consuming, represents a high-value benefit for our resources management. We save time, people and money. "
Johan van Heerden,
Principal Mine Surveyor of Kumba Iron Ore
The result of the fruitful cooperation between Airbus and Pinkmatter Solutions, a South African based specialist in geo-information software design and satellite image processing, is a service that facilitates Kumba to follow the evolution of the mine and to effectively manage their extraction.
To provide this service to the South African mining company, Pinkmatter Solutions receives very high-resolution 50cm imagery products from Pléiades optical satellites once a week which they automatically orthorectify using custom high-precision Ground Control Points. This precision ortho product is produced to fulfill all the customers’ requirements so that it can be used in their own CAD software.
So even on the same day of the acquisition of the imagery data and processing, Kumba receives a set of geographic information in form of a user friendly report to make informed decisions for optimal production and resource allocation.
As the service proved its reliability, user-friendliness and high value, Kumba decided to integrate it in their mine in Komela, too.
Pinkmatter Solutions is a software company focused on design and development of tools for the automated extraction of information and intelligence from satellite imagery. They are Airbus Defence and Space privileged partner.
Kumba Iron Ore Limited, a member of the Anglo American plc group, is a leading value-adding supplier of high quality iron ore to the global steel industry. Kumba produces iron ore in South Africa at Sishen mine and its Kolomela mine in the Northern Cape Province. Kumba exports iron ore to customers in a range of geographical locations around the globe including China, Japan, Korea and a number of countries in Europe and the Middle East.
Remote Monitoring of Iron Ore Mining Pits with Stack Insight
