Earth commentary satellites are bulking up.
“Everyone’s moving to those greater satellites because the price and volume constraints have modified,” said James Mason, Planet senior vp of space systems. “All of our customers are demanding several types of data, higher quality and lower latency.”
Precise tailoring
Capella Space’s latest generation of Acadia synthetic aperture radar satellites are 50 percent larger than their predecessors.
Moving from 112-kilogram Whitney to 165- to 187-kilogram Acadia makes no difference by way of launch costs since Capella is purchasing a dedicated Rocket Lab Electron for every satellite.
“Mass isn’t as essential anymore,” said Christian Lenz, chief technology officer for San Francisco-based Capella. “Things like capability, performance, [and] lifetime are all more essential at this stage.”
Customers for Capella’s SAR imagery and data, including government defense and intelligence agencies, are accountable for the satellite’s redesign.
Acadia satellites are “tailored more precisely towards their needs,” Lenz said.
Customers want high-resolution imagery and a high signal-to-noise ratio. As well as, they like Capella’s multi-look images that look less speckled because satellites give attention to a location for tens of seconds.
“Latency is one other thing that is incredibly essential to a vital set of shoppers,” Lenz said. “There are some customers who need their images inside 24 hours. There’s also a customer set that needs it inside 4 hours. And a complete latest customer set that needs it inside quarter-hour.”
To cut back latency, Capella is mounting Mynaric optical communications terminals on Acadia satellites. The terminals, that are compatible with the interoperability standard established by the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, “provide the promise of getting latencies of under quarter-hour sometime in the long run,” Lenz said.
Acadia satellites also feature larger solar panels than Whitney and more batteries. Capella bought Electron launches to send Acadia satellites to mid-inclination orbits. Those orbits “give us faster revisit for the areas that individuals care about,” including the Asia-Pacific region, Lenz said.
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Agile aerospace
Planet is well-known for gathering every day, moderate-resolution imagery of Earth’s land with a constellation of about 130 Dove and SuperDove cubesats.
The San Francisco-based company also is understood for rapidly updating cubesat designs. SuperDoves, which gather imagery in eight spectral bands versus 4 for Doves, were the 14th iteration of the design. The seventeenth version is now within the works.
“We’ve spoken quite a bit through the years about agile aerospace and the transition from a more traditional satellite development model into this more agile, higher paced one,” Mason said.
For Planet, that meant moving from an 11-megapixel camera to 29 megapixels to 47 megapixels as Doves evolved. Each latest camera required additional power, higher radios, improved hard drives and updates to Planet’s ground infrastructure.
Birds of a feather
Planet’s in-house manufacturing extends from Doves to Pelican and Tanager, 100- to 200-kilogram satellites with a standard bus.
The larger bus “removes those hard constraints of attempting to pack all the pieces on this tiny box,” Mason said. “It allows us to construct more reliable, modular systems because we’ve got a bit more room to work with. We’ve taken the very best of what we’ve learned from the SkySats and SuperDoves, and we put that right into a latest satellite design that’s more flexible, more agile, lower cost and better performance.”
Pelicans, scheduled to start launching this yr, will capture 30-centimeter Earth imagery. Tanager satellites with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory hyperspectral sensors are being built for Carbon Mapper, a public-private partnership focused on pinpointing, quantifying and tracking sources of methane and carbon dioxide.
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Remapping the world
Satellogic, an agile aerospace proponent that builds satellites in Uruguay, equipped its latest Mark V with a more spacious hosted payload bay and improved downlink capabilities.
Mark V, which began launching in 2022, obtains 80-centimeter multispectral resolution imagery compared with 99-centimeter for its predecessor. Mark V also observes a bigger swath: 8 kilometers from a 520-kilometer orbit, compared with five kilometers for Mark IV. And a hyperspectral camera on Mark V provides 18-meter resolution imagery.
“The Mark V is the cornerstone of Satellogic having the ability to remap the world monthly, weekly after which every day with higher resolution, larger swath and faster download capability,” said Matt Tirman, chief business officer for Satellogic North America.
Mark V’s updated electronics didn’t have a major impact on satellite size or cost. Each satellite costs satellite about $1 million to construct and launch.
“The true leap goes to be our NewSat in 18 to 24 months, which might be in a bigger bus with a much higher resolution,” Tirman said.
Blended missions
The 140 satellites in Spire Global’s constellation range in size from three to 4, six and 16-unit cubesats. (Cubesats measure 10 centimeters on both sides.)
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“Generally, our satellites are getting a bit bit greater,” said Joel Spark, Spire co-founder and chief satellite architect.
The adoption of 16U cubesats was prompted by Spire’s Space Services customers whose applications sometimes required more power, data downlink capability and volume than Spire could offer with 6U cubesats.
Still, Spire doesn’t make a pointy distinction between satellites gathering weather, maritime or aircraft tracking data for Spire products and Space Services satellites. In lots of cases, hardware and software for multiple customers fly on the identical Spire satellites.
When Spire was founded in 2012, the corporate manufactured its own cubesats because few corporations could meet its needs. Now, it’s the rapid iteration cycle that keeps the Vienna, Virginia-based company manufacturing satellites in-house.
“We’re continuously upgrading the technology each from a hardware perspective and a software perspective,” Spark said. “Customers want increasing volumes of knowledge, and they typically want it more quickly.”
To hurry up communications, Spire is equipping satellites with each optical and radio-frequency intersatellite links.
“We also preload our satellites with additional processing capability, greater than we currently use,” Spark said. “By moving that data processing to the satellite, our customers have been capable of do really incredible things.”
For instance, Spire’s internal and Space Services customers are improving sensor performance with artificial intelligence. AI also helps satellites work together to watch objects or areas of interest.
“It’s a brave latest world by way of people having the ability to use these sensors to do incredible things,” Spark said.