The best place to glean detailed information about what’s happening on the ground might be hundreds of miles above the earth.
Within the satellite imaging industry, a newer, more specialized niche has emerged: Hyperspectral imaging, which goes beyond the red, green, and blue found in traditional satellite imagery. By assigning a more diverse set of colors to values beyond the primaries, hyperspectral imaging can break down an image with more precision.
In practice, that precision provides the ability to help identify oil and gas leaks, changes in soil, and fluctuations in crop health.
Led by startups including India-based Pixxel and Silicon Valley-based Orbital Sidekick, hyperspectral imaging companies are working with utilities, defense contractors, and gas firms to provide detailed on-the-ground imagery.
“Instead of three color bands, we have 500 color bands. What that allows us to do is effectively chemically fingerprint each object in our data set because everything reflects and absorbs light in a unique manner,” Dan Katz, CEO and co-founder of Orbital Sidekick, told Tech Brew. “We’re able to see [those] reflectance and absorption features because they have all of that spectral information.”
Katz said that chemical fingerprinting is helpful when examining things that the human eye and more traditional imagery cannot, like methane and oil leaks. Orbital Sidekick’s Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite (GHOSt) constellation is designed to provide fresh data every week, and Katz said the company plans to grow the constellation to 14 satellites within the next few years.
Awais Ahmed, CEO and co-founder of Pixxel, told Tech Brew that the opportunity for his company stemmed from a lack of hyperspectral satellites in orbit. With these satellites, Ahmed said Pixxel can give detailed insights into things like soil and crop health, which are critical to a farmer’s operations.
“If I’m looking at a farm with an existing multispectral image…I can tell you that it’s a crop, and I can tell you…the health of the crop, nothing beyond that. What you need to be actually seeing is what is in the soil and what nutrients are missing. Is there enough irrigation there? Is there enough moisture in the chlorophyll content? That’s what hyperspectral, with the additional hundreds of wavelengths that you can capture, enables you to see,” Ahmed said.
Pixxel currently has three demo satellites in space, but plans to launch a constellation of six in orbit by the end of the year, with the eventual goal of a 24-satellite constellation.
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.
Hyperspectral imaging is a nascent industry, but it’s seeing big investment from venture capitalists and government agencies alike.
Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Analytics, told Tech Brew that the hyperspectral market is just hitting its stride, and that the millions of dollars in investments the industry is receiving, mainly from the US Department of Defense, is a sign of its value.
“For a long time, this corner of the market was immature. When you compare [it] to optical satellite imagery, or even synthetic aperture radar, or weather, you need a lot more maturity, technologically, for all of those sensor types,” Henry said. “For optical and for radar, you also had a lot more business maturity in terms of where people knew how to find customers, or where people could find customers, how they can take data that they collected from space, and turn it into something useful and monetizable. I would say that for hyperspectral, those pieces are just now starting to fall into place.”
Henry said that hyperspectral imaging’s ascent can be attributed to three factors: Smaller and cheaper components thanks to Moore’s Law; improved processing power across the remote sensing industry; and increased interest in the burgeoning imagery tech from the US military.
The National Reconnaissance Office awarded six companies with hyperspectral imaging capabilities, including Pixxel and Orbital Sidekick, five-year study contracts in March, TechCrunch reported.
Each contract is worth around $300,000 and will initially assess each company’s capabilities, cybersecurity, and business planning before entering a second stage centered around data procurement.
Orbital Sidekick recently raised $10 million from investors, including oil and gas outfits Williams and Oneok, in addition to a $16 million Series A in 2020 that was matched dollar-for-dollar with a contract from the US Air Force, TechCrunch reported.
To date, Orbital Sidekick has raised almost $47 million, while Pixxel has raised $33 million, according to Crunchbase.
While the technology of hyperspectral imaging is impressive, the real value of the satellites will likely come not from the tech, but the analysis of the data the satellites collect. Katz, Ahmed, and Henry all suggested that the data collected and then processed by companies like Pixxel and Orbital Sidekick could be the difference-maker in the ultimate value of these satellites.