Hydrosat launches first payload to monitor hot-spots on Earth

WASHINGTON — Remote sensing startup Hydrosat today successfully launched its first temperature-taking sensor, designed to measure water scarcity — a capability that already has piqued interest from the US Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

The Hydroasat VanZyl-1 mission, carrying a thermal infrared camera, was carried on Loft Orbital’s YAM-7 spacecraft, launched via a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg SFB, Calif., as part of the Transporter-11 rideshare mission. SpaceX originally was set to loft Transporter-11 on July 8 but was pushed back by the grounding of all Falcon flights following the failure of a July 11 Starlink launch.

Hydrosat, headquartered here but with offices in California, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, is primarily focusing its operations on measuring water stress for civil and commercial environmental and climate change applications.

“What we do is we take the temperature of plants and find out how healthy they are, and we can give farmers the information they need to grow more produce,” explained Hydrosat co-founder Royce Dalby in a LinkedIn video today.

But the company’s capability to precisely measure land surface temperatures — using data from a wide variety or Earth monitoring satellites and a software suite for data fusion — also has potential military and national security applications.

In an interview with Breaking Defense in January 2022, Hydrosat CEO Pieter Fossel explained that that dryer land is hotter than damper land, and land with vegetation is cooler than arid land with sparse plant life — all relevant for how military forces may move through the terrain or airspace. “The true soil moisture of an area … has big implications for preparing the battlespace, and so that’s where a lot of the defense interest in in our company has come from,” he said.

Even before putting anything in orbit, the company nabbed a series of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the US Air Force to explore using its hot-spot monitoring data to predict where dangerous “brown outs” from dusty soil could endanger helicopter landings. The NRO, which is responsible for US spy satellite fleet, also granted Hydrosat a study contract last December to evaluate both ts analytic chops and its future imagery capabilities.

Hydrosat intends to operate a 16-satellite constellation in sun-synchronous low Earth orbit at approximately 529 kilometers in altitude to provide global coverage, imaging the same spot on Earth at the same local time every day. The cameras will be able to “see” a 185 kilometer swath of ground using a “push broom” sweeping technique, so that they don’t have to be specially tasked to a target.

The satellites will carry of mix of a long-wave payload providing thermal infrared data and a seven-channel multispectral payload that can “see” targets using visible to near-infrared wavelengths. Whereas electro-optical sensors for visible light are optimal in the daytime, infrared cameras can take imagery at night.

The firm is planning to launch a second instrument on a microsat owned by Muon Space, from which Hydrosat will provide imagery services, sometime early next year.