SAN FRANCISCO – With funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, MyRadar will develop and launch cubesats to validate technology for its future weather and environmental data constellation.
MyRadar announced a NOAA Phase 2 SBIR grant Aug. 18 for a pair of Orbital Wildfire Resilience cubesats. The cubesats, measuring 10 centimeters on a side, might be equipped with high-resolution optical cameras, thermal infrared imagers and near infrared hyperspectral imagers that observes 16 bands between 600 and 900 nanometers.
“This spectral-band density allows us to characterize fuel loads and aerosol loading,” Sarvesh Garimella, chief scientist and chief technology officer for MyRadar and parent company Acme AtronOmatic, told . “It’s a multi-hazard approach because wildfires aren’t just the fires, they’re the particulate matter and the air-quality degradation. And the dry vegetation can change where and who’s in danger. Getting accurate up-to-date maps of fuel is an enormous a part of the mission as well.”
Onboard AI
With onboard artificial intelligence, the satellites might be “in a position to tell us what they see as an alternative of getting to point out us what they see,” Garimella said. “A key profit to that’s it solves the bottleneck of downlinking an enormous amount of information from a tiny little satellite.”
To accommodate the dimensions, weight, power and warmth constraints of a 1u cubesat, MyRadar developed onboard AI that ramps up data collection when essential.
“We now have a low-power, always-on system that’s in a position to gather context information and choose whether it’s value kicking on the total system and collecting the high-resolution, multi-sensor dataset for a wildfire event,” Garimella said. “The primary mission is to have an onboard AI collect training data within the wildland-urban interface environment for the long run constellation in an automatic way.”
Industrial Constellation
My radar launched three PocketQube protypes in 2022precursorsfor the corporate’s Hyperspectral Orbital Distant Imaging Spectrometer (HORIS) constellation.
Environmental data captured by the HORIS constellation might be paired with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create data-fusion products for the corporate’s government and business customers. MyRadar also intends to attract on data from the HORIS constellation to reinforce its MyRadar weather app.
MyRadar received FCC approval in 2022 to exhibit technology for a constellation that ultimately could include 250 satellites or more.
With processed data from the HORIS constellation, MyRadar intends to create products to observe extreme weather, coral reefs, algal blooms, illegal fishing, national security and wildfires, in keeping with the FCC license.