LOGAN, Utah – Geospatial intelligence company Orbital Insight announced plans Aug. 9 to work with Israeli startup Asterra to jointly provide remote sensing analytics to water utilities, infrastructure organizations and other industries.
Establishing a relationship with Orbital Insight will make Asterra data accessible for a wider audience, Lauren Guy, Asterra founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement.
Palo Alto, California-based Orbital Insight fuses different types of sensor data into its Go platform, including electro-optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and radio frequency monitoring, to shed light on economic, societal and environmental activity. The company works with corporations like Unilever and Chevron in addition to government customers like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
Asterra, founded in 2017, offers Earth-observation products and services based on SAR satellite data. Asterra EarthWorks, for example, draws in L-band polarimetric SAR data to detect soil moisture underground. Working with Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Foundation for Applied Water Management Research, Asterra is testing EarthWorks as a tool for inspecting soil moisture near canal levees and flood defenses.
Asterra gathers data from Japan’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2, and Saocom 1A and 1B radar satellite built by the Argentina’s space agency and operated jointly with the Italian Cosmos-SkyMed constellation.
Under the agreement with Asterra, Orbital Insight will determine customer requirements and pursue opportunities that take advantage of Asterra’s analytics. Initially, the collaboration will focus on facility monitoring by identifying underground water, sewage, chemical leaks and erosion.
“Asterra’s Earth observation technology for monitoring infrastructure is the best in the business, and we’re thrilled to add this rich data source to our suite of products,” Orbital Insight CEO Kevin O’Brien said in a statement. “We also have a shared goal to use geospatial technology, analytics and data science to make our world safer and more sustainable, so this partnership helps progress the whole industry forward.”
