Three quarters of the modern space market is the commercial segment, and one quarter is government projects and programs. The use of space technologies and the data they collect, combined with the most advanced digital technologies, creates many business opportunities, which include the development of new products and services and the creation of new business models. If such technologies and business opportunities are well-sustained, they can help create tangible and intangible value through new forms and sources of income, operational efficiency, and the initiation of new projects leading to multidimensional (e.g. society, environment) positive impacts. Examples of commercial uses of space include satellite navigation, satellite television, and of course modern commercial satellite pictures, which even allows to get satellite imagery providers in cloudy weather.
Commercial rockets are launched from different continents, space startups are attracting hundreds of millions of investments, tourists are buying up space tickets, and NASA trusts private traders with interplanetary launches and soil mining on the Moon. In this article, we have collected the most striking examples of commercial companies that make a huge contribution to the availability of Satellite Imagery Providers and their analytics.
EOS Data Analytics – Satellite Imagery Providers
EOS Data Analytics is a product company that operates in the commercial space niche, headquartered in the United States. The company works on projects that help companies minimize their environmental impact, from reducing waste across industries, introducing renewable energy sources, to reforesting, and optimizing water use.
Key products of EOSDA include:
- Crop Monitoring. This digital platform was designed for precision farming based on satellite data. The tool helps farmers, agricultural companies, food producers, input suppliers, insurance companies, and others to manage fields remotely, allowing for saving time, optimizing resources, increasing yields, ensuring field activities effectiveness, estimating fields productivity, and much more.
- Forest Monitoring. This software is almost the same, but for sustainable forestry management. The tool helps industry players reduce the risks associated with deforestation, water scarcity, forest degradation, wildfires, and illegal logging.
- Land Viewer. This online tool was designed for working with satellite data. It enables quick search, processing and download of valuable information from satellite images to solve real business problems.
Having years of expertise in agriculture and forestry, the company decided to create its EOS SAT project – an agro-focused satellite constellation of 7 optical satellites that will be launched into a Low Earth Orbit by 2025. The satellites will be equipped with 11 agri-related bands to make it an agriculture and forestry oriented satellite monitoring project that will increase the efficiency and precision of the company’s products.
Planet
Smaller and cheaper low earth orbit satellites are increasingly providing images with greater detail, shorter intervals, and greater coverage of different terrains. With more than 170 satellites, the American company Planet takes daily high-resolution images of all the land on Earth, which is 58 million square miles. High-resolution images of 1 square meter per pixel show things like roads, buildings, and the average color of crops and forests. Resolutions, measured in tens of centimeters, show even more, expanding the possibilities.
Planet also has a database called Planet Stories that allows for viewing, comparing and sharing images. There are two tools – Compare and Timelapse. Compare allows people to select two images and put them in a slider for comparison. Timelapse allows you to select multiple images and create an animated timeline of changes. Unusually, Planet collects daily images of all the land on the globe. In addition, Planet shares images and experiences with accredited news organizations.
Hummingbird Technologies- Satellite Imagery Providers
Hummingbird Technologies Ltd is the agricultural remote sensing company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze images collected from drones, aircraft, and satellites, combined with weather, soil and plant pathology data to enable precision farming. They use advanced machine learning and computer vision algorithms to provide actionable crop data so that farmers can manage their land in a more sustainable way.
Capella Space
Founded in 2016, Capella Space, an American company based in San Francisco, California, has set itself the goal of providing users around the world with the opportunity to obtain high-resolution commercial radar images of the planet’s surface.
Capella Space plans to deploy 36 satellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar. It was assumed that the mass of one satellite would be about 40 kilograms. The system should allow obtaining radar images of the Earth’s surface with a resolution of 50 centimeters. It is assumed that the final constellation of 36 satellites will make it possible to obtain an image of any part of the planet with an interval of no more than one hour.
Maxar Technologies
Maxar Technologies is a space company headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, USA, specializing in communications, Earth observation, radar and satellite in-orbit maintenance, satellite products, and related services.
Maxar Technologies is an amalgamation of Vricon, DigitalGlobe, Radiant Solutions, and SSL. Vricon is a company’s subsidiary providing 3D geospatial analytics using satellite data. DigitalGlobe is a supplier and manufacturer of high resolution satellite imagery. Radiant Solutions is a satellite modeling and analytics subsidiary, and SSL is a satellite construction subsidiary.
