[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Albedo (YC W21) - Highest resolution sate...
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Launch HN: Albedo (YC W21) - Highest resolution satellite imagery
Hey HN! I'm Topher, here with Winston and AJ, and we're the co-
founders of Albedo (https://albedo.space). We're building
satellites that will capture both visible and thermal imagery - at
a resolution 9x higher than what is available today (see
comparison: https://photos.app.goo.gl/gwokp4WT8JPvyue98). My
technical background is primarily in optics/imaging science related
to remote sensing. I previously worked for Lockheed Martin, where I
met AJ, who is an expert in satellite architecture and systems
engineering. We've spent most of our career working on classified
space systems, and while the missions we were involved with are
super cool, that world is slower to adopt the latest new space
technologies. We started Albedo in order to create a new type of
satellite architecture that captures high resolution imagery at a
fraction of the cost historically required. Winston was previously
a software engineer at Facebook, where he frequently used satellite
imagery and realized the huge potential of higher resolution
datasets. While the use cases for satellite imagery are endless,
adoption has been underwhelming - even for obvious and larger
applications like agriculture, insurance, energy, and mapping. The
main limitations that have prevented widespread use are high cost,
inaccessibility, and low resolution. Today, buying commercial
satellite imagery involves a back-and-forth with a salesperson in a
sometimes months-long process, with high prices that exclude all
but the biggest companies. This process needs to be simplified with
transparent, commodity pricing and an automated process, where all
you need to buy imagery is a credit card. On the accessibility
front, it's surprising how few providers have nailed down a
streamlined, fully cloud-based delivery mechanism. While working at
Facebook, Winston sometimes dealt with imagery delivered through
FTP servers or physical hard drives. Another thing users are
looking for is more transparency when tasking a new satellite
image, such as an immediate assessment of when it will be
collected. These are all problems we are working on solving at
Albedo. On the space side, we're able to achieve the substantial
cost savings by taking advantage of emerging space technologies,
two of which are electric propulsion and on-orbit refueling. Our
satellites will fly super close to the earth, essentially in the
atmosphere, enabling 10cm resolution without having to build a
school bus sized satellite. Electric propulsion makes the fuel on
our satellites way more efficient, at the expense of low thrust.
Think about it like your car gasoline going from 30 to 300 mpg, but
you could only drive 5 mph. Our propulsion only needs to maintain a
steady offset to the atmospheric drag, so low thrust and high
efficiency is perfect. By the time our first few satellites run out
of fuel, on-orbit refueling will be a reality, and we can just
refill our tanks. We're still in the architecture and design phase,
but we expect to have our first few satellites flying in 2024 and
the full constellation up in 2027. The current climate crisis
requires a diverse set of sensors in space to support emissions
monitoring, ESG initiatives/investments, and infrastructure
sustainability. Thermal sensors are a key component for this, and
very few are currently in orbit. Since our satellites are larger
than normal, they are uniquely suited to capture the long
wavelengths of thermal energy at a resolution of 2 meters. We'll
also be taking advantage of advances in microbolometer technology,
to eliminate the crazy cooling requirements that have made thermal
satellites so expensive in the past. The current state-of-the-art
for thermal resolution is 70 meters, which is only marginally
useful for most applications. We're aiming to adopt the stance of
being a pure data provider (i.e. not doing analytics). We think the
best way to facilitate overall market growth is to do one thing
incredibly well: sell imagery better, cheaper, and faster than what
users have available today. While this allows us to be vertical
agnostic, some of our more well-suited applications include: crop
health monitoring, pipeline inspection, property insurance
underwriting/weather damage evaluation, and wildfire/vegetation
management around power lines. By making high-res imagery a
commodity, we are also betting on it unlocking new applications in
a similar fashion to GPS (e.g. Tinder, Pokemon Go, and Uber). One
last thing - new remote sensing regulations were released by NOAA
last May, removing the previous limit on resolution. So between the
technology side and regulatory side, the timing is kind of perfect
for us. All thoughts and questions are appreciated - and we'd love
to hear if you know of any companies that could benefit from our
imagery. Thanks for reading!
Author : topherhaddad
Score : 119 points
Date : 2021-02-01 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
| omarhaneef wrote:
| As a potential consumer of this kind of data it would be valuable
| to know how much of the US you can cover. If the revisit rate is
| every 12 days, do I get all the US every 12 days? What if I want
| it all at a lower resolution?
|
| My suggestion is to have different verticals on the product page
| and to show specs from their perspective. One for the hedge fund
| counting cars in parking lots, one for the cops trying to find a
| missing person, one for the amateur sleuths investigating crop
| circles.
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! We are currently working with some
| partner customers on featuring their applications on our site.
|
| Quick definition of how _revisit rate_ is used across the
| industry: it denotes how often a satellite has the
| _opportunity_ to image an area. So with our full constellation,
| we 'll have a revisit rate of 2-3 times per day for latitudes <
| 60 deg N/S (info on the website), meaning you could put a
| tasking order over a certain area for that frequency. Although
| we expect most of our applications to need something more like
| a weekly cadence for image collects.
| spuz wrote:
| How on earth do you do on-orbit refueling? I've never heard of
| that outside of science fiction.
| nieksand wrote:
| Though this is really a tug rather than propellant transfer:
|
| https://www.space.com/private-satellites-docking-success-nor...
|
| But not so sci-fi.
| mkoryak wrote:
| you don't do it on earth :)
| bitminer wrote:
| I have a demo website that is "4-clicks" to ordering satellite
| imagery. Include one for the data type, and one for the date.
|
| Contact me by email if you would like a demo. (I'm trying to
| avoid HN overload.)
| slingnow wrote:
| I don't see your e-mail address anywhere. I'm interested in
| such a product.
| bitminer wrote:
| Non rapid updates to HN profile, I guess.
|
| hncollector@ and the domain is bitminer.ca
| Nightlifer wrote:
| This is really interesting and I have no doubt the applications
| are gigantic across a whole suite of industries. I do however
| have a question about your final statement around creating a
| commoditised market for high-res imagery. How do you see this
| evolving over time on what is essentially privatised satellite
| infrastructure?
|
| You note the parallel with GPS - but this is a 'free spinoff'
| developed by and for the US govt (and still bankrolled by the US
| taxpayer) rather than something owned and run by private
| enterprise. GPS was never developed explicitly with profit in
| mind. In GPS, the end user also 'owns' their gps traces, in that
| they can choose to share them with 3rd parties freely.
| Additionally, there is no value discrimination in gps - all
| traces are treated the same by the infrastructure owners
| regardless of how valuable they are (no one is charged more if
| they use the gps on their phone to enable lots of apps vs someone
| who only uses it for a single thing). Imagery data on the other
| hand is much more likely to have different value depending on
| what is being imaged (there is more value in an image of a busy
| port than there is of a random patch of empty ocean).
|
| My feeling is that the high res imagery market right now feels
| more like the market for satellite automatic identification
| system (AIS) data used in maritime. AIS data is expensive because
| it is gate-kept by a relatively small number of satellite
| companies who charge a premium for access and carefully guard how
| that data is used by onward parties - completely unlike GPS.
|
| As in AIS, because a small number of imagery companies will not
| only own the infrastructure, but also the images produced by that
| infrastructure, I'm not sure how it can be commoditised in the
| same way GPS has been - unless you plan to charge a low flat fee
| for essentially all images regardless of what they depict and
| what they are used for?
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Great points! The GPS analogy is definitely not 1-to-1. Our
| main point with the analogy is this: when GPS technology was
| developed, there was no foresight of applications like Tinder,
| Uber, Pokemon Go, which all would not be possible without GPS.
| So in that sense, we expect that if we are able to push
| satellite imagery in the direction of becoming a commodity,
| this will unlock applications we have no foresight of today.
| SVB & Space Capital released a great report on this idea called
| The GPS Playbook
| Alasater wrote:
| While it's definitely true GPS is a "free spinoff" of a
| government service (ie not really free), it is accessed by
| developers through a platform you purchase that translate that
| GPS signal into useable data (ie your phone, your car, other
| things you purchase of which GPS is "available"). In that lens,
| we foresee a similar use for satellite imagery data, gathered
| through a platform, ours or other satellite service providers,
| and made available to other users. The cost of entry for
| utilizing GPS is hidden under these platforms and service
| taxes, and we look to develop a low cost of entry for utilizing
| satellite imagery for platforms to use and burgeon; hence the
| example of things the engineers building GPS never expected
| their data would be used for! I've spotted a few commenters on
| here who are hoping to use low-cost imagery for just that.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> (there is more value in an image of a busy port than there
| is of a random patch of empty ocean)
|
| Tell that to the military. There are people who will pay
| serious money for a particular patch of ocean if it can be done
| reliably at an exact time.
| blendergeek wrote:
| Have you considered making satellite imagery available to the
| OpenStreetMap community in order to help improve the map?
|
| Microsoft already makes their Bing satellite imagery available to
| map makers.
| evil-olive wrote:
| > By the time our first few satellites run out of fuel, on-orbit
| refueling will be a reality, and we can just refill our tanks.
|
| Are there any companies you're aware of that are working on this
| currently?
|
| If this doesn't materialize in the timeframe you expect, how
| would that affect your business model? Would you need to raise
| prices to cover the additional cost of launching new spacecraft
| to replace old ones that run out of fuel and de-orbit after X
| years?
|
| This seems like a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem - even if on-
| orbit refueling becomes commercialized by the time your
| spacecraft runs out of fuel, you'll need to launch with whatever
| hardware is necessary to allow the "tanker" spacecraft to dock
| and transfer propellant. Defining that interface in such a way
| that spacecraft from multiple companies can all be refueled by a
| single "tanker" spacecraft seems tricky both from a technical
| angle as well as from a political/social one.
| topherhaddad wrote:
| There is a ton of effort currently being put into the on-orbit
| servicing world. Orbit Fab is leading the way on providing the
| fuel depots, and a number of other companies are developing the
| robotics required to send servicing satellites in between Orbit
| Fab depots and the satellites they are filling up. Worst case,
| if the refueling is still a few years out by the time we need
| it, we would increase our orbit to extend our satellite
| lifetime (at the cost of lower spatial resolution).
| jl2718 wrote:
| So... the easy part of this is the resolution of the focal plane
| array. Gigapixel CMOS is easy/cheap. Then there's the diffraction
| limit of the optics. They'll have to be huge to get a small GSD.
| But the biggest physical limitation is always getting the data
| back down to earth. How have you grown a link budget to match
| your resolution?
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Great observation! One of the biggest challenges for high
| resolution satellite imaging, even beyond the optics, is
| getting all those pixels down. Fortunately, the ground station
| infrastructure has blown up recently with Big Tech offerings
| like AWS Ground Station and Azure Orbital, plus legacy
| providers like KSAT, so there is plenty of access to get data
| down through Ka-band.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Just getting a rough idea here: 10cm gsd at 200km elev with
| 500nm wavelength requires a 1m aperture to hit the
| diffraction limit. If you use 40dbi phased arrays at 100W you
| get -40dbm at the receiver and hit the noise floor at about
| 100gbps, which is 40km2 of raw photos per second of downlink.
| So i guess it's not whole earth observation, but definitely a
| lot of capability for pre-tasked observation. But then we
| have to ask, why satellites rather than aerial drones? A
| satellite is on a relatively fixed trajectory that hits any
| given target for 11 minutes of every 90, and the same with
| the ground station if you're lucky enough to have both on the
| same trajectory. What is the use case where this is cheaper
| or superior (aside from no-fly zones)?
| nataz wrote:
| Maybe I missed it on your website or your post, but when will you
| be up and running?
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| From the post:
|
| _We're still in the architecture and design phase, but we
| expect to have our first few satellites flying in 2024 and the
| full constellation up in 2027._
| maxerickson wrote:
| Have you thought about allowing your imagery to be used to add
| information to OpenStreetMap?
| winstontri wrote:
| Absolutely! We're definitely admirers of the HOTOSM/OSM
| community and would love to contribute towards the mission. If
| you know of anyone within HOTOSM who would be interested in
| talking, please tell them to email info@albedo.space
| mkarliner wrote:
| I'd bring up the same issue I make to all start-ups.
|
| I'd like to see your code of ethics.
|
| Like so many technologies today, this could be used by the dark
| side. You have a responsibility to consider that and put the
| principles in place to prevent that. Now.
| topherhaddad wrote:
| We appreciate you bringing this up - we're acutely aware of the
| privacy implications and potential for abuse/misuse. There
| isn't a straightforward or easy answer to this, but we want to
| be ahead of the curve and not repeat the mistakes that other
| companies have made in the past. We expect this to be an on-
| going, evolving issue over time, but also something we want to
| start thinking about from day one. As far as practical steps,
| we'll be approving new customers on a case-by-case basis,
| building our robust internal tools to find bad actors, as well
| as the obvious measures of adding punitive clauses to our terms
| and conditions. We know that's not enough and we'd love to hear
| any other ideas folks have on this. The positive applications
| related to climate and human rights issues are exciting, but we
| realize we have to properly address privacy and misuse
| prevention before we can start to open those former
| conversations. In terms of personal privacy, 10cm resolution
| does enable one to identify a person (you can _detect_ people
| in good sun conditions, but not _identify_ ).
| moftz wrote:
| One of them has already worked on the so-called "dark side". I
| doubt they are going to refuse sales to anyone unless there are
| ITAR or sanctions involved.
| Loughla wrote:
| I would like to second this. How do you ensure this data and
| service won't be used to spread evil?
| ricksunny wrote:
| Signaling encouragement.
|
| Since much of the tech stack you describe seems to be offered by
| Planet, (and having experienced the delays and sticker-shock
| associated with the salesperson-driven enterprise sales process
| with such companies firsthand), might the industry evolve in such
| a way that Albedo act as a priceline.com / overstock 'off-brand'
| reseller of Planet's existing data pipelines? Does developing
| your own tech-stack basically give you 'table stakes' i.e.
| signaling a viable alternative to sales channel conversations
| with existing satellite imagery providers?
| winstontri wrote:
| Thanks for the encouragement!
|
| I would say that the industry is already trending towards more
| of a third-party reseller model with companies like Arlula,
| UP42, Astraea, and numerous others. While we do see the
| benefits of being able to offer multiple sources of satellite
| data (virtual constellations combining high-res, low-res, SAR,
| hyperspectral, etc.) we want to limit our attention to doing
| one thing extremely well: providing high-res visible imagery.
|
| To your point of developing our own tech-stack for "table
| stakes" - we certainly hope so. Planet has done a lot of
| fantastic work here as far as developing robust imagery
| pipelines but stopped short of removing salespeople from the
| process. We're hoping to take their approach a step further and
| remove that manual (human) component from both the sales
| process and delivery pipelines.
|
| Hope that helps!
| tullianus wrote:
| I'm a spacecraft thermal engineer (not in remote sensing), and
| this sentence leapt out at me. Do you have any example papers on
| microbolometer advances you could share?
|
| > We'll also be taking advantage of advances in microbolometer
| technology, to eliminate the crazy cooling requirements that have
| made thermal satellites so expensive in the past.
| topherhaddad wrote:
| I don't have any papers offhand, but the wikipedia page on
| microbolometers is great. Traditional sensors for thermal
| imaging are made of materials like InSb and HgCdTe, which
| require cooling to cryogenic temperatures in order to limit
| dark noise. These types of sensors are similar to visible
| sensors where an electron is generated for each incident
| photon. Microbolometers operate fundamentally differently,
| where electrical resistance in response to temperature changes.
| While most space thermal sensors today still use traditional
| materials, most terrestrial thermal cameras (night-vision,
| thermal drones) use microbolometers when imaging in LWIR.
| burnte wrote:
| As someone who has to manage sites across the country, sometimes
| it behooves us to draw out own layout maps for various reasons.
| Finding decent overhead imagery is insanely difficult. This
| sounds ideal. Just give me a decent resolution overhead image and
| call it a day. Too many companies want to get deeply involved in
| the process.
| davorb wrote:
| Satellite imaging is used by a lot of researchers and non-profits
| to analyze concentration camps in North Korea[0] and it's one of
| the few sources that we have access to. Would you consider
| offering free-of-charge images of these camps to researchers and
| human rights organisations?
|
| [0] https://www.aaas.org/resources/geospatial-technologies-
| and-h...
|
| [0]
| https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/12000/asa24010201...
| topherhaddad wrote:
| 100p! Human rights issues is an area where we think higher
| resolution will be super helpful, and we are planning to make
| our archive data freely available for these types of
| applications as well as large discounts on tasking.
| mam2 wrote:
| oh come one.. if you can't even pay 20 euros for working on
| defending freedom, why would you expect other people do give
| their life for it.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Perhaps some people live in a lower cost of living area where
| 20 euros represents the majority disposable income for the
| month. I would bet most people on HN come no where near
| donating 5% of their income to charity despite needing less
| than 50% of their income to subsistence level live
| PTOB wrote:
| People don't have to give their lives if you can divert
| thousands of dollars in required costs (over time) to good
| equipment, analyst salaries, etc.
| FelixHoenikker wrote:
| Would be very helpful to understand a few aspects that are common
| hurdles for small sat constellation companies. How much will each
| of your sats cost? What is the projected development cost to
| launch your first satellite? Or What will you need to raise from
| investors to get one satellite in orbit? What is your strategy
| for de-risking what sounds like a lot of new tech before your
| first launch? When does the first, to spec satellite fly (not
| including hosted payloads)? Why LWIR over MWIR? How would you
| respond to competitors claiming claiming similar thermal imaging
| resolution (MWIR)?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| If the first few satellites are flying in 2024, what technology
| do you have already? In other words, how are you able to provide
| a comparison shot vs status quo today if the satellites aren't up
| yet?
|
| On the timeline scale, if your satellites are only going up in 3
| years, is there any reason to believe competitors won't catch up
| to your imagery quality?
|
| Btw congrats on trying to democratize access beyond complex sales
| processes. I hope it works out for you!
| topherhaddad wrote:
| The comparison shot was taken with a drone at an altitude that
| corresponds to our 10cm resolution. The 30cm version was
| obtained through downsampling the 10cm image.
|
| Other companies could potentially drive towards higher
| resolution, but spatial resolution isn't everything. You give
| up temporal resolution (revisit rates) and overall area
| coverage, so we expect some companies to continue to cater to
| the lower resolution type applications.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Farm crop management
| enriquto wrote:
| Looks really cool! I love when new sensors appear!
|
| Some (minor) questions:
|
| > both visible and thermal imagery - at a resolution 9x higher
| than what is available today
|
| This sentence is infuriatingly ambiguous. Does the 9x refer to
| only thermal, or also to visible? And what does 9x even mean?
| Today I can buy worldview3 data which is 30cm/pixel. Are you
| offering 3.33cm/pixel? I don't think that this is possible
| without a major, Nobel-prize deserving, breakthrough in optical
| imaging.
|
| > Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-
| forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with
| high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies.
|
| This does not match with my personal experience. For many
| satellites, I can just click a region of interest on a map, and
| pay the satellite data using a credit card. It is much cheaper to
| get images from the archive than tasking, but apart from web-UX
| shenanigans the process is quite streamlined.
|
| > The current climate crisis requires a diverse set of sensors in
| space to support emissions monitoring
|
| What wavelengths are you aiming for? What spectral resolution?
| I'd say that most emissions detection happens at the near and
| short-wave infrared bands, far from the thermal. What climate-
| relevant emissions are you thinking about, specifically?
|
| I love the contents of this message, but I would like to see it
| much more specific. This first paragraph it's ok but reads like
| marketing-speak, not a scientific language.
|
| > While the use cases for satellite imagery are endless, adoption
| has been underwhelming
|
| This sentence is comically false.
| woodgrainz wrote:
| Presumably the "9X higher" imagery is due to the fact that this
| company's satellites will fly much lower than the current
| commercial fleet. OP says as much in his post -- they'll fly
| "in the atmosphere."
|
| So no Nobel-prize level achievements needed in optical
| breakthroughs.
| slingnow wrote:
| Do you have any data to back up that simply lowering a
| satellite can achieve a 9X increase in image resolution? Or
| are you merely speculating?
| enriquto wrote:
| If you divide the height of the satellite by X then the
| resolution is multiplied by X. This is Thales theorem [0].
| What else do you need?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercept_theorem
| topherhaddad wrote:
| It is rather ambiguous, apologies. Imaging is a 2-dimensional
| measurement, so spatial resolution improvements follow a
| squared nature. Our GSD will be 10cm, so we arrive at 9x by
| (30^2/10^2). Said another way, nine 10cm pixels will fit in one
| 30cm pixel. The 9x refers to the visible imagery, whereas our
| thermal (LWIR) GSD will be 2m, and the best available today is
| 70m.
|
| For thermal, we're only doing broadband 7.5um - 13.5um. You're
| correct in that direct emissions measurements is best made with
| SWIR. However, there are applications where heat signatures can
| be used to calculate emissions. For example, if you know the
| surface material and fuel type of a power plant, you can
| calculate carbon emission from the heat signature in the
| thermal image. Climate Trace will use our data for this.
| enriquto wrote:
| Thanks for the answer! It was clarified in the website, but
| the "9x" sentence was still ambiguous. Very often, image
| processing people will understand "resolution" as a linear
| unit, like dpi or gsd. Using its square seems strange, likely
| only useful for marketing purposes, and thus a red flag for
| technically minded people.
|
| That said, 10cm per pixel is impressive if you manage to pull
| it through! Cannot wait to buy these images!
| topherhaddad wrote:
| I totally agree the 9x is somewhat marketing speak, but I
| do think that the way GSD has historically been
| characterized by the 1-dimensional measurement does not do
| spatial resolution improvements enough justice. Electro-
| optical imaging systems are analogous to any digital
| sampling system. If you were sampling a sine wave at 90 Hz
| instead of 10 Hz, that's clearly a 9x improvement as you
| end up with 9x more samples. The same is true for imaging,
| you're digitally sampling an object with discrete pixels
| (of course there's more to overall image quality than just
| spatial resolution). Another side note is that the
| government NIIRS imagery rating system captures this
| squared effect through the log2(GSD) term in the equation.
| Photographers also think more about it in 2D, as they
| characterize resolution in total Megapixels in the image.
| Ok I'm done, I'll get off my resolution soapbox :)
| neuah wrote:
| I would agree that resolution is usually considered a linear
| unit (eg X cm/pixel). The improvement still looks great, but
| I also find the 9x a bit misleading.
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| You mentioned agriculture as an avenue, but I'm already aware
| of farmers using drones for such tasks. Also importantly, it
| can be done on the farmers' timescale, rather than the last
| time a satellite was overhead.
|
| They monitor all sorts of things, soil wetness, crop/weed
| growth, weed identification, cattle location (they used to
| use helicopters here in Oz for such things)...
| tdy721 wrote:
| But how do you pronounce the name of your company? Al-bay-doh,
| Al-bee-doh? I must know!
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Al-bee-dough. Origin: it's a term for how much light is
| reflected off of a surface (the average for earth is 30%)
| rasen58 wrote:
| Are there any use cases of satellite imagery that you think will
| emerge but haven't yet due to current costs?
| winstontri wrote:
| I think wedn3sday hit some of the key use cases we're
| personally excited about!
|
| Agriculture is an interesting use case we're also excited
| about! While it's one of the most obvious applications,
| adoption has been curbed through historically high minimum
| order sizes, where cost is an implicit factor. Some providers
| require up to a 250 sq. km minimum order area, which already
| prices out a lot of small time farmers. We're hoping to reduce
| our minimum order area to 1 sq. km. and help enable this semi-
| neglected portion of the market. One company we're excited
| about in this space is Enveritas, a company looking using
| geospatial data to push for sustainability within the global
| coffee industry.
|
| That's just one I can think of from the top of my head!
| wedn3sday wrote:
| - Environmental activists holding large corps responsible for
| illegal dumping. - Tracking illegal fishing operations. -
| Tracking migrant animal flocks. - All sorts of litigation
| surrounding land-use.
| notahacker wrote:
| I worked with a startup using satellite imagery around
| illegal dumping and land use litigation, and affiliated with
| a university looking at illegal fishing! For some types of
| illegal dumping open satellite data gets you a long way even
| with 10m pixels: the real difficulty is getting actions taken
| or proof of who's doing it when its not the landowner.
|
| I think the 10cm resolution could be as significant in
| opening up new use cases.
| omneity wrote:
| At Monitoro[0] we've been asked for satellite imagery
| monitoring (geographic change detection). Supplier prices were
| prohibitive but I'm glad to see activity in this space (pun non
| intended) and we're considering pursuing it at some point.
|
| [0]: https://monitoro.xyz
| neuah wrote:
| Interesting approach! I'm curious about your sample image
| comparison. You mentioned in response to another comment that it
| was taken by a drone and the image on the right was downsampled
| by a factor of 3 to mimic the resolution of currently available
| satellite images. However, the image on the left has artifacting
| that looks reminiscent of deep learning-based methods for
| deblurring, denoising, or super-sampling. Is the image on the
| left actually a raw drone image? How much of the stated 9x
| improvement (actually 3x) is hardware/sensor-based vs software-
| based?
| topherhaddad wrote:
| It is a raw drone image. I probably should have picked a
| different option, as this was collected just after sunset,
| which gives a nice uniform lighting but also leads to more
| noise and some of those artifacts you mention.
|
| The resolution improvement has nothing to do with software
| (although there are super-resolution methods to improve it). It
| has to do with both flying very low as well as building a
| larger telescope than normal. While the satellites will still
| be much smaller than the traditional approach to capturing 10cm
| resolution, they will be larger than the new space smallsat
| movement we've been seeing the last few years.
| neuah wrote:
| Thanks! Good luck. I'm excited to see where this goes!
| alach11 wrote:
| From an oil industry perspective, it would be very fun to play
| with this data over the Permian Basin. I reviewed Planet's
| offerings and the resolution was insufficient. And thermal
| unlocks some more possibilities.
| byefruit wrote:
| This looks really cool and congrats on the launch.
|
| A few questions.
|
| How big do you foresee your constellation being?
|
| How fair is the comparison in your Google Photos link? The image
| on the right seems to have significant artifacting that looks
| more a side effect of compression.
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Thanks! Our initial constellation will be 24 satellites, which
| will enable 2-3 revisits per day to areas of interest.
|
| We used a drone to capture this image at our representative
| resolution (10cm), but it only captures in JPEG so there could
| be compression artifacts from that. The image on the right is a
| 1/3 downsampled version to show 30cm resolution.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| So your sample image, isn't real?
|
| Which reminds me, wouldn't drones always be able to capture
| better imagery due to lower altitude? It's my understanding
| Google maps is all done from aircraft on the higher
| resolutions.
| mNovak wrote:
| It's generally harder to keep drones aloft 24/7 though.
| Also then subject to more stringent airspace laws.
| nathanielostrer wrote:
| How is what you will offer different / better / cheaper than
| Planet?
| winstontri wrote:
| I'll assume you're referencing SkySat imagery, as that's the
| more direct comparison to our product!
|
| Different is more of an over-arching theme, so I'll focus on
| how we're better and cheaper. We are better in the sense that
| our native resolution will be 25x finer than theirs - Planet
| SkySats have 50cm native GSD and our satellites will have 10cm
| native GSD. This is "better" in the sense that we're more
| resolute, but we do sacrifice coverage.
|
| As far as cheaper goes, the commercial space industry has made
| a lot of progress in the past 10 years, and as a result,
| getting to space has gotten substantially cheaper. This may be
| slightly oversimplified, but we're hoping cheaper costs for us
| will transfer over to our users.
| jdjtjjtbtbfjfkt wrote:
| What is the image latency? Can you live stream?
|
| Use case: following a person in real-time
| Nightlifer wrote:
| Doubtful - OP notes in another comment that they will get 2/3
| revisits to an area of interest per day - so every 8-12hrs ish.
|
| Real time following (a la Will Smith in Enemy of the State)
| from satellite imagery remains fictional at present.
|
| The balance of coverage vs resolution is largely dependent on
| satellite constellation altitude. Higher altitude = more
| coverage but worse resolution. More satellites also gives
| better coverage, but adds cost. To get enough coverage for
| streaming at high enough resolution for tracking an individual
| person needs a) an infeasibly large satellite constellation b)
| improvements to image resolution so higher altitudes (and thus
| better coverage with fewer satellites) c) guaranteed clear
| skies (for imagery data at least).
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Exactly. Lots of trade-offs in remote sensing. We're bullish
| on SAR to clean up on monitoring applications, due to the
| ability to see through clouds and at night. As that plays
| out, high res optical will be even more important for context
| when SAR detects some sort of change (then optical can be
| used to see what caused the change).
| blackcat201 wrote:
| 15 dollars per square kilometer is quite affordable for this
| level of resolution! Is there any info about satellite coverage
| or plans that you can share?
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Glad to hear that! We have details on our coverage and specs
| here, https://www.albedo.space/product-specs
| tomek777 wrote:
| Solve cloud problem and you won't have to worry about clients.
| diaspar wrote:
| I wonder if you would accept some small capital from a friendly
| developer that wants to invest in a small company and see how his
| investment turns out in 10 years. If so,
| https://twitter.com/diaspar3 DM me
| scrappyjoe wrote:
| This sounds awesome! There are lots of applications in places
| like local government. One potential problem with offering _only_
| commodified whip-out-your-credit card pricing is that innovative
| business units inside large orgs can't make use of your product,
| since they need to motivate for budget and generally procure for
| specific deliverables.
|
| AWS has addressed this by making it possible to buy a 3 year
| compute 'asset' which you can record as a capital expense rather
| than an operating expense.
|
| Pay attention to pricing your product in a way that enables your
| customers to buy it!
| winstontri wrote:
| Fantastic point! We're emphasizing the whip-out-your-credit-
| card-to-pay model as a departure from the existing industry
| sales cycle, but we don't expect this to be the only pricing
| mechanism customers would like.
|
| On the AWS topic, we've similarly seen a good amount of
| reception around a credits-based system.
|
| > Pay attention to pricing your product in a way that enables
| your customers to buy it!
|
| You're absolutely correct and thank you for the feedback!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I want. There is some imagery that I want to look at very
| regularly, weekly/daily if possible, but cannot get ahold of
| easily. (Land use issues near family property). At a 15$ minimum,
| I will put in several personal orders on day one.
| oleh wrote:
| That sounds amazing, thanks for sharing!
|
| I was thinking about building a low-code SaaS to make analyzing
| such imagery simpler and more accessible. Think of LabView in a
| browser. A graphical programming environment that compiles to
| Python, so that the whole Pandas and AI universe was available
| and simple analysis and data presentation workflows could be
| built by anyone. Input daily imagery, automatically output time-
| series graphs, curve fits, augmentation by other data sources
| (stocks, weather, AIS, etc), ... seems like a natural combination
| to me, but maybe I'm too excited over my own idea?
|
| I have to admit though, having earned a physics PhD in a laser
| lab, I would much prefer to work on optics and satellite tech
| than software ;-)
| winstontri wrote:
| Like a Jupyter notebook but for satellite imagery? I think a
| good number of people may have taken your idea and ran with it
| :)
|
| Google Earth Engine, Astraea, Descartes Labs, and a whole host
| of other companies have demonstrated a ton of value in this
| space, so you're absolutely correct. There's definitely work to
| be done fusing in other data sources like AIS, but I think the
| foundation is set.
|
| Let us know if you end up building it - we'd be more than happy
| to float you some test data!
| mNovak wrote:
| Sounds very cool. Curious to know your thoughts on offloading
| data from the satellites - 9x resolution sounds a whole lot like
| 9x the data. Is this challenging, or also easier since you're low
| altitude?
|
| Are you building up your own ground network for collection, or
| planning to use a third party service?
|
| Likewise as a SATCOM antenna designer, I'm curious to know what
| constellation designers such as yourselves think of the current
| 'big dish' gateway infrastructure.
| Alasater wrote:
| Indeed a 9x in resolution is a big ol chunk of data, and
| primarily, increases in the bands collected (PAN vs RGB vs NIIR
| vs LWIR vs hyperspectral/multispectral) data is one piece of a
| complicated puzzle of how to get data to the ground. Previous
| entrants have spent a lot of money building out their own
| networks and infrastructure, helping contribute to high costs
| of imagery. We look to leverage the ground-station-as-a-service
| industries such as AWS, KSAT, and Azure Orbital to help
| downlink our data. Add to that a switch over to Ka band (higher
| bandwidth) with inter-satellite links in the tradespace, you
| start to help the data problem. As well, every image provider
| does some amount of lossless compression (compressing the non-
| informative data) to help manage some of that. But the overall
| data to manage is also a factor of how much tasking you
| anticipate per rev, if the image you collected is actually
| useful (ie clouds), if the customer is interested in all those
| bands for their task, and many more variables.
|
| In terms of the 'big dish' gateway infrastructure, it eases
| link budgets and opens bigger pipes, but if you're limited in
| your output power and your access, having smaller dishes and
| more proliferated networks may make more sense (sounds similar
| to your Big satellite vs many small satellite trades :) )
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| This is cool. We have been working with Satellite imagery (and
| some SAR) since mid-2020. Though costly, it is not so difficult,
| these days, to just task or buy archives of high-resolution
| imagery (~50cm). However, we are always on the look-out for more
| economical and multiple sources of imagery for use in
| Agriculture.
|
| What is the best possible way to email you so I can have it and
| searchable in future to refer back to you (when you are ready for
| commercial release)?
|
| Here is something I learnt recently. High-Resolution imagery are
| sleek and nice. This, actually, turns out to be a victim-of-
| success scenario where potential customers expects such imagery
| for the sake of it but they won't pay and, honestly, don't need
| it to be so clear (especially in Agriculture). We realized that
| the data from a 3-meter resampled is good enough for most needs.
| topherhaddad wrote:
| Yeah great point, there are a number of agriculture
| applications that have no need for this level of spatial
| resolution. Certain high value crops only use drones today due
| to the resolution, so we'll be able to support those
| applications. Additionally, there's ways to combine visible +
| thermal to evaluate water crop stress to detect potential
| irrigation issues or improvements.
|
| Feel free to fill out the Contact Us form on the website and
| we'll keep you updated as we get closer towards commercial
| release!
| treis wrote:
| >Certain high value crops only use drones today due to the
| resolution, so we'll be able to support those applications.
|
| For a farm sized area, wouldn't an autonomous drone be a lot
| cheaper&better?
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| This is not a binary answer; it depends. It is also not
| "satellites or drones"; both can be used as complementary
| based on the degree of data precision needed and the budget
| in hand.
| treis wrote:
| Aren't drones cheaper and better?
| enriquto wrote:
| I guess drones are _much_ more expensive. You can buy a
| satellite tasking plan for much less than a continuously
| running drone campaign for the same area.
|
| Of course drones are better, as in having an arbitrarily
| high resolution and being 100% under your control.
| treis wrote:
| If I have a 2 sq km farm that I want pictures of once a
| week that will cost me $1500 through Albedo. Drones can
| be had for half that. I don't know that there's an out of
| the box solution that can automate it, but it seems like
| the better long term solution.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I believe the drones with a camera that can take such
| high precision shots (assuming hyperspectral) will cost
| lot more than that. For quick reference, check out DJI's
| Agri Drones[1].
|
| For context; we talked to a few tea growers in the
| eastern side of India. They spend north of $150,000 -
| $200,000 on drones and UAVs to track/collect data over
| 20,000 hectares of tea farms. Our sample satellite date
| can do the same at a fraction of the cost though the
| precision drops by about 10%. The idea then now is to
| combine satellite imagery solution + occasional high-
| precision drone sweeps.
|
| 1. https://ag.dji.com/
| pedalpete wrote:
| As the founder of https://ayvri.com, I've got some experience
| with this space as a customer or large amounts of satellite
| imagery. We expected the price of imagery to decrease, but what
| we've found is that as the resolution increases, the value of the
| imagery is higher for a larger number of businesses, and
| therefore, imagery providers like Bing (now Azure) have 10x'd the
| price, focusing on customers with lower demands, but more dollars
| to spend.
|
| The question I have is regarding diminishing returns of satellite
| vs aerial at high resolutions. We're one example of a service
| that needs large areas of high resolution imagery, but most use
| cases as we understand them, are focused on areas in the sub-
| kilometer range, and therefore can likely be well serviced by
| drones in the near future.
|
| Planet Labs, as an example, seem to now be focusing less on the
| source of the imagery, and mixing satellite with aerial in order
| to get the best result, using the right tool for the job.
|
| I'm sure you've thought deeply about this, and I'd be keen to
| understand why you think theirs is the wrong appraoch.
| chasely wrote:
| I would consider myself straddling the hobbyist/professional line
| in geospatial computer vision, where high-resolution imagery is
| very much needed but very expensive.
|
| I have lots of small projects I want to work on, but can't bring
| myself to pay $20-30/km^2 with a high minimum coverage area.
| Would Albedo help this very small section of the market?
|
| I'd like to continue on these side projects and hopefully use it
| to build something greater, but the high entry costs make
| experimentation difficult.
| winstontri wrote:
| This is exactly what we want to enable! We're hoping to offer 1
| sq. km. minimum order sizes (for tasking, archive will have no
| minimum) to help grow both the hobbyist and even commercial
| applications as best as we can.
|
| Just curious: have you looked into third-party resellers? They
| typically have low minimum order sizes and are fairly
| reasonable, even with a smaller budget.
| fjabre wrote:
| The fields of archaeology and anthropology would benefit greatly
| from this.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| > Today, buying commercial satellite imagery involves a back-and-
| forth with a salesperson in a sometimes months-long process, with
| high prices that exclude all but the biggest companies.
|
| When I read statements like this, I tend to read it as "We are
| not Maxar (Digital Globe)". They are definitely the "legacy" in
| the commercial satellite imagery market. But what do you see as
| the discriminator of your company to newer companies providing
| commercial imagery like Planet and BlackSky? High resolution and
| thermal imagery are certainly discriminators but other companies
| are driving that direction too (higher resolution, larger
| spectral coverage).
| topherhaddad wrote:
| It's a good question, and I while I obviously have no
| definitive information on other satellite companies, I will say
| that spatial resolution isn't everything. The higher you go,
| you give up temporal resolution and area coverage, which is key
| for Planet's _monitoring_ mission. There 's also plenty of
| other phenomenologies to go after - for example Blacksky
| announced their next-gen constellation will have SWIR. And for
| us, the thermal is really only possible since we are already
| capturing such high resolution visible (due to the long
| wavelength of LWIR).
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