Washington startup Hydrosat plans to launch its first thermal-infrared instrument July 8.
It will launch aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-11 flight.
The instrument, designed to measure water stress in agriculture, will fly on Loft Orbital’s YAM-7 mission.
“Our mission, as a company, is to help the globe produce more food with less water. This data will feed into our existing software platform and help us reach more customers in more parts of the world and deliver more value to those customers.”
Hydrosat is focused on building a constellation to acquire global, daily, field-scale, thermal-infrared data, which Fossel sees as a gap in the existing market.
National programs tend to offer frequently updated lower-resolution imagery from spacecraft in geostationary orbit or less frequent moderate-resolution imagery from low-Earth orbit. The NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat mission, for example, has provided medium-resolution global imagery biweekly for decades.
For its second mission, Hydrosat plans to send a multispectral and thermal infrared imaging instrument into orbit early next year on a Muon Space Constellation-as-a-Service spacecraft.
IrriWatch
Data from Hydrosat’s VanZyl-1 mission will feed into the company’s IrriWatch platform.
IrriWatch serves customers in 38 countries, combining the firm’s proprietary data with free NASA and European Space Agency observations.
While Hydrosat is focused on agriculture and climate change, customers may have additional applications for the data. For instance, Hydrosat is preparing to share thermal imagery with the National Reconnaissance Office.
Ahead of the launch, Hyrosat is help customers get ready to ingest VanZyl-1 data.
After launch, the Rochester Institute of Technology will assist the company in data calibration from the new sensor.
Hydrosat’s VanZyl-1 is named for company co-founder Jakob van Zyl, who died in 2020.
Correction: Hydrosat’s thermal sensor will fly on Loft Orbital’s YAM-7 mission, not YAM-6.
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