Planet unveils Forest Carbon Monitoring dataset

SAN FRANCISCO – Earth observation company Planet unveiled a product Sept. 24 for monitoring global forests. Planet’s Forest Carbon Monitoring product offers quarterly estimates of the amount of carbon stored in branches, leaves and other plant tissue above ground at a resolution of three meters per pixel. In addition, it shows canopy height and canopy…

NASA SPAR Lab shares AI tool for spacecraft

SAN FRANCISCO – Artificial intelligence promises to make spacecraft increasingly resilient and capable of gathering data without waiting for instructions from ground controllers. “We’ve been limited with the way we’ve done work so far,” Evana Gizzi, AI research lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told SpaceNews. “And there are so many things we want…

LEO takes center stage for communications at sea

Ship owners are increasingly relegating geostationary satellites to the backseat and turning to low Earth orbit networks for primary communications at sea, according to a panel of multi-orbit maritime service providers.

The invisible battle for space dominance

As geopolitical tensions extend beyond Earth’s atmosphere, the U.S. Space Force is sharpening its focus on dominating the electromagnetic spectrum. Space electronic warfare — the art and science of protecting and denying satellite signals — has become a key part of how modern militaries fight and defend. Examples include jamming satellite communications, disrupting Global Positioning…

Eartheye Space raises $1.5 million

SAN FRANCISCO – Singapore startup Eartheye Space raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to expand its online satellite-tasking platform. Eartheye Space, founded in 2022, calls itself the “Uber Eats” of Earth-observation data. Uber Eats can deliver food from multiple restaurants and Eartheye Space “can combine any of the 475-plus satellites across all the sensor modalities,”…

Collimate offers tool to predict downlink success

SAN FRANCISCO – Collimate Space, a new Silicon Valley startup, aims to tackle a specific problem for satellite operators. Collimate offers a tool for predicting the success of satellite downlinks, after considering space weather, terrestrial weather and the location and profile of ground-based antennas. That’s valuable because satellite operators can say to a customer, ‘I…

Navigating by sight

SAN FRANCISCO – A NASA formation-flying experiment shows the promise of autonomous navigation for satellite swarms. The four cubesats in the Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment, or StarFOX, calculate their orbits by combining visual images from star trackers with robotics algorithms. “Such a visual-navigation system on a swarm of satellite can be used to navigate around…

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