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SAN FRANCISCO — Hydrosat announced plans June 5 to gather thermal-infrared imagery with a second satellite launching later this month on the SpaceX Transporter-14 rideshare.
VanZyl-2 has four times the imaging capacity of VanZyl-1, Hydrosat’s first spacecraft launched in August. VanZyl-1 observes 2 million square kilometers daily.
“On our VanZyl-2 satellite we are able to image 8 million square kilometers per day,” Pieter Fossel, CEO of Washington-based Hydrosat, told SpaceNews by email. Increasing imagery capacity is “critical in providing a commercial complement for the Landsat Next program,” he added.
Like its predecessor, VanZyl-2 is equipped with a thermal imager and a multispectral camera to “meet a majority of the mission needs and requirements of Landsat users,” Fossel said.
AI Applications
Hydrosat, founded in 2017, is building a constellation to gather daily imagery. The imagery is paired with artificial intelligence for monitoring vegetation health, planning efficient irrigation and detecting droughts.
“These machine-readable datasets can be processed automatically and ingested seamlessly into AI applications,” Fossel said. “Automated analysis has been at the core of our mission from the start. We’ll use this data in our products, like IrriWatch, and deliver this to other companies building their own AI applications.”
With Hydrosat data, customers can gauge wildfire risk, track urban heat, measure cloud-top temperatures and observe critical infrastructure. Defense and civil applications include maritime-domain awareness, determining whether terrain is firm enough for vehicle traffic, detecting dust in landing zones and mapping facility construction.
Building Momentum
VanZyl-2 is scheduled to launch in June from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
“With the upcoming launch of VanZyl-2, Hydrosat continues to build on the momentum of our first mission, advancing our goal of providing daily, high-resolution thermal infrared data with global coverage,” Scott Soenen, Hydrosat chief technology officer, said in a statement. “VanZyl-2 will significantly increase both Hydrosat’s imaging capacity and revisit rate, providing customers with more high-quality data for their applications.”
VanZyl-1 and VanZyl-2 are named for Hydrosat’s late co-founder Jakob van Zyl, a former NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory associate director.
Muon Space built Hydrosat’s satellite. ABB and Simera Sense manufactured the instruments.
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