News

KSAT has signed a contract for ground station support of HYPSO-1, a smallsat mission from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), aiming to detect toxic algae blooms — this is the first time KSAT will provide ground station services to a Norwegian university mission.

At NTNU Small Satellite Lab, a multi-disciplinary team of master students, PhD-students and professors are currently working on a small satellite with a miniaturized hyperspectral camera for detection of toxic algae blooms along the Norwegian coast. KSAT will as part of this contract, provide commercial ground station services from the Svalbard Ground Station for this mission, called HYPSO-1.

The smallsats in the HYPSO-project will be equipped with miniaturized hyperspectral cameras, that are able to “see” more than traditional optical sensors, covering parts of the infrared spectrum. In combination with drones and autonomous vehicles both on surface and subsea, the goal is to be able to detect and alert the fish-farms about toxic algae blooms in the area. In 2019 a sudden upwelling of toxic algae killed close to 8 million salmon in Norwegian fish farms, wiping out more than half of the annual sales growth in just over a week. The hope is that with the contribution of this mission, one can avoid this in the future.

As a significant provider of maritime monitoring services, KSAT had an active role during the algae bloom last year and together with partners in Tromsø they are currently exploring how to discriminate between different types of algae by combining different sensors and applying advanced algorithms.

Executive Comments

“We are very excited to get access to KSATs ground stations both at Svalbard and at other locations,” said Associate Professor Egil Eide at the Department of Electronic Systems. “HYPSO-1 will be part of a multi-agent surveillance system, operating both drones and surface vessels in near-real-time. It is very important to get data from as many satellite passes. This is an important strategic cooperation between NTNU and space industry, that will benefit students and researchers alike.”

Kristian Jenssen is the Director of KSATLITE, a division at KSAT that is dedicated to the development and delivery of scalable, global ground station services for smallsats. The team are currently handling the major portion of the commercial smallsats on-orbit today, including some of the large constellations. Jenssen emphasized that the students through these projects acquire unique hands-on experience, which is very relevant and thus valuable for KSAT as a possible future employer. “It is important for us that students that want to delve into the discipline of spacecraft engineering and space related sciences, can get the chance to do so at Norway’s largest technical university,” stated Jenssen, adding, “It’s exciting with these new and small hyperspectral sensors. We support the project and believe it can provide a valuable contribution to future systems for algae warning and coastal monitoring to increase the understanding and support commercial aquaculture.”

Hi Jonata, the annual Small Satellite Conference has just concluded, what are the key take away from Leaf Space?

It has been a week dense of emotions and discoveries. After some months of lock downs across the globe, we have been able to convey again with many of our current and future clients, and industry colleagues too. We also realized that the new space economy never actually stopped. It continued working to have commercially operational smallsat constellations despite the inevitable launch delays. Most of our customers are pushing to get their satellites in orbit as soon as possible and at the same time focusing on their next-generation satellites. In turn, we are scaling up of our ground network and improving the services overall to always provide them a simple, reliable and cost-effective Ground Segment as a Service solution.

How is your Leaf Line ground network growing?

During spring, in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak, we secured a series A funding that triggered the scale up plan of Lead Space. We are now proceeding in activating new sites worldwide and installing new ground stations. We have just cut the ribbon on our new GS in the Azores that will provide enhanced coverage in the Atlantic, and we have few ground stations ready to be shipped to new sites in New Zealand, North America and the equatorial region. We are also installing additional antennas in our historic location in Spain, and soon we will have a new location in East Europe. The pandemic has slowed down the roll out planned for Q2 2020 a bit, but now we are catching up. All these new locations are very attractive not only for satellite missions, our main vertical, but also for the increasing need coming from new and established launch vehicle operators.

Tell me more about launch vehicles, and how Leaf Space is supporting this part of the market.

In 2019 Leaf Space was selected to support the final testing campaign of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne vehicle, an experience that has been really fruitful to gain operational know-how.  Right now, we are developing new solutions to better support this kind of test and launch campaign with an “as a Service” model, that is our real key added value. All this added to the fact that our ground stations are flexible and compact so they can be easily deployed in different spaceports or launch facilities. Also, we have started providing LEOP services to satellites also through Launch Brokers, which provides a better and more comprehensive service to their customers.

Why should clients buy Ground Segment Services from Leaf Space and not build their own network or rely on other providers?

For microsatellite operators, the ground segment in general is seen as a key part of their business, but as it is not the core of their business managing this internally is actually seen as a disadvantage. What they really want to focus on is harvesting data from space, processing that data and delivering it to the end users. In addition, efficiently managing a ground station network is not an easy task. If you think about the multiple hardware and software blocks needed to guarantee a secure and reliable communication, all the regulatory challenges and the specific skills you need to deploy and run a network, this is clearly something that many operators handover to a specialized partner. This is especially true if your partner can provide a more reliable and cost-effective solution thanks to the distributed nature of our network and high degree of automation, from load balancing to rescheduling. We’ve made a webinar on this topic during the Smallsat Conference that will be published soon!

What are your main objectives for the upcoming months?

Well, we have customers in the major part of the rockets scheduled to launch from now to the end of the year and we will support them not only during LEOPs but also through our services Leaf Line and Leaf Key.

On the R&D side we’re working on both increasing the performance of the Ground Stations composing our network, to allow faster data downlink and even support higher frequencies, but also on supporting an even wider range of MODCOD schemes and protocols in order to decrease the onboarding time of our customers.

On a revenue perspective, last year we had already significant revenues, and we plan to double this year and have a quite growing trend after that.

To get more traction on the US market we will soon open a new subsidiary there; we already have people working from the US, but we think that a legal entity will provide us even more visibility both to commercial and institutional market.

So, we’re quite busy!

exactEarth has now completed the firm’s previously announced transaction to divest four satellites from the company’s first-generation constellation and ground station assets to Myriota Canada, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Myriota PTY.

The Company has received the necessary Canadian regulatory approvals and met all closing conditions to consummate the transaction. The agreement was initially announced via press release on March 31, 2020. All financial figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated.

Executive Comments

“This transaction will further strengthen our financial position by generating approximately $1.0 million per year in net cash savings while preserving our access to the Satellite AIS data originated by the four satellites for the duration of their lifespan,” said Peter Mabson, President and CEO of exactEarth. “It also extends our relationship with Myriota, which is an exciting and up-and-coming company that exactEarth has invested in and one that we have built a strong business relationship with over the past several years.”

“This transaction marks a pivotal moment for Myriota in the acceleration of our North American expansion plans, including the establishment of our new Ontario, Canada office,” said Alex Grant, CEO of Myriota. “The addition of new satellites, industry-experts, and a global network of ground stations will only fast-track our timeline to bring low-cost, low-power IoT connectivity to North American agriculture, defense, mining, and transport and logistics industries.”

Skyrora continues with its de-risking program by preparing to launch the Skylark Micro rocket from Iceland later this month.

With the first launch window scheduled for August 12, the two-stage, four-meter tall, sub-orbital rocket is set for take-off from Langanes Peninsula, Iceland.

Following the July test for trajectory and hardware on the Skylark Nano, the Icelandic launch of the Skylark Micro will test onboard avionics and communications as well as practice marine recovery operations.

Skyrora’s de-risking program is based on testing its systems with smaller and more cost-effective vehicles before they are used in their larger Skylark L and Skyrora XL rockets. The company’s LEO rocket, the Skyrora XL, is scheduled to launch in 2023.

Executive Comment

Volodymyr Levykin, the CEO of Skyrora, said, “Skyrora’s de-risking programme is essential for scaling, learning and education before we launch our two commercial vehicles, Skylark L and Skyrora XL. The entire team is working at a pace and has made great efforts to get another launch underway. I’d also like to express my thanks and gratitude towards Space Iceland and Iceland’s government, both of which have been tremendously supportive with the preparations for this upcoming launch.”

The Space Dynamics Laboratory-built Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter satellite has been awarded the Small Satellite Mission of the Year award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) — this announcement was made during the recent annual Small Satellite Conference.

SDL designed and manufactured the HARP spacecraft to carry the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Earth and Space Institute-built HARP payload, which was developed to measure the microphysical properties of cloud and aerosol particles in Earth’s atmosphere.

The Small Satellite Mission of the Year Award is presented annually by the AIAA Small Satellite Technical Committee to the mission that has demonstrated a significant improvement in the capability of small satellites. Missions must have individual satellite wet mass of less than 150 kilograms and must have launched, established communication, and have acquired results from orbit after January 1, 2019, 12:00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time.

To demonstrate significant improvement, nominated missions must show innovation in spacecraft structural design, scientific instrument development, communications capability, attitude determination and control capability, intersatellite coordination, constellation or cluster management, onboard computing, or other mission aspects.

The HARP mission seeks to mitigate barriers to assessing climate change that are caused by the scarcity of measurable data about aerosol forcing, insufficient understanding of aerosol-cloud processes, and cloud feedbacks in the climate system. New observations and a better understanding of aerosol-cloud processes will help to narrow climate change estimate uncertainties.

Executive Comments

“HARP has been a truly collaborative effort between UMBC and SDL, demonstrating how university organizations can collaborate with NASA to advance space science and technology to achieve major earth science goals,” said principal investigator Dr. J. Vanderlei Martins of UMBC. “The Small Satellite Mission of the Year award is a major honor to the HARP team, and a testament to the success of this collaboration.”

“To be selected from the many accomplished small satellite missions throughout this year is an honor and reflects the vision, unshakeable commitment, and scientific expertise of Dr. Martins and his team at UMBC and NASA,” said Alan Thurgood, SDL’s director of Civil and Commercial Space. “The men and women of SDL share in Dr. Martins’ vision for HARP, and we are fortunate to have been able to provide the spacecraft and operational management to help enable mission success.”

“It has been a privilege for SDL to build and operate a spacecraft that is helping to validate new technology, prove the on-flight capabilities of a highly accurate, wide field-of-view hyper-angle imaging polarimeter, and demonstrate that small satellites can provide top-quality Earth sciences data,” said Tim Neilsen, SDL program manager for HARP. “The engineers, technicians, spacecraft operators, and other professionals at SDL remain resolute in helping to ensure HARP meets its mission objectives.”

Recently, GomSpace Luxembourg SARL and the European Space Agency (ESA), signed a contract to continue development and implementation of the Juventas CubeSat in support of the Hera mission.

The contract value is approximately 11,000,000 euros and is focused on the delivery of the Juventas spacecraft and its associated payloads for launch with Hera in 2024. The amount will be divided between several partners, whereof GomSpace share is about 6,100,000 euros.

Together, NASA’s DART and Hera missions, and the international research collaboration known as the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA), will demonstrate deflection technology that could be used to protect Earth from hazardous asteroids by shunting them off a collision course. Juventas is a 6U smallsat containing a low frequency radar, named JuRa, as its primary payload (see Hera’s CubeSat to perform first radar probe of an asteroid).

The smallsat will operate in close proximity to the Didymos asteroid system, focusing radar and radio-science experiments targeting the moon of the binary asteroid, named Dimorphos. Juventas will complete its mission by attempting to land on the surface of Dimorphos, making measurements on the landing dynamics from likely bouncing events to capture details of the asteroids surface properties and end with measurements taken by a gravimeter payload to give insight to the dynamical properties of the asteroid.

GomSpace Luxembourg is the project prime and is also working with GomSpace Denmark and GomSpace Sweden on some spacecraft platform components. The project continues the successful collaboration built from the initial design phase and includes the partners:

• GMV Innovating Solutions from Romania leading the guidance, navigation and control subsystem
• EmTroniX from Luxembourg leading the low-frequency radar payload electronics implementation
• Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble leading the radar concept design and specifications, scientific measurements, and contributing to the receive chain electronics
• Technische Universität Dresden University providing the expertise in RF antenna simulation and test, and contributing to the transmit chain electronic
• Filip Záplata from the Czech Republic contributing to the radar digital design
• Astronika from Poland delivering the deployable radar antennas.
• Embedded Instruments and Systems delivering the gravimeter payload with support in its design and scientific contributions from the Royal Observatory of Belgium

With both GomSpace Luxembourg and EmTroniX centrally positioned in the project it fully supports Luxembourg’s long-term vision for space exploration and exploitation.

Executive Comments

“The Juventas mission will be complementing the larger Hera mothercraft significantly increasing our science return. JuRa will provide the first ever direct measurement of the interior structure of an asteroid. Juventas will also attempt the first ever small body landing by a cubesat to reveal important surface properties. We are very excited to start the implementation phase together with the strong consortium led by GomSpace,” said Ian Carnelli of ESA, Project Manager of the Hera project.

“We are happy to continue our collaboration with ESA and the Hera project on this exciting mission. Juventas will be the first GomSpace designed nanosatellite in deep space demonstrating its capabilities in the harshest environment thus far. As part of the project we will continue to build our deep space capabilities and organisation based in GomSpace Luxembourg,” added Niels Buus, CEO of GomSpace.

“The Luxembourg led Juventas satellite is a very important pathfinder mission cementing our national position as a pioneer in developing the required capabilities for peaceful exploration and sustainable use of space resources,” noted Marc Serres, the CEO of the Luxembourg Space Agency.

PredaSAR Corporation has reported that the company’s first of 48 advanced commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites will launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Inc. is the launch integration provider in addition to manufacturer of the spacecraft. As part of the agreement, PredaSAR, Tyvak and SpaceX will be working together to optimize the deployment plan for the remainder of PredaSAR’s constellation which, according to the company, is the world’s largest and most advanced commercial SAR satellite constellation.

Executive Comments

PredaSAR CEO Maj. Gen. Roger Teague, USAF (Ret), said, “PredaSAR spacecraft possess the latest in space-proven, high quality satellite systems to support scalable and fully capable operations. PredaSAR aims to deliver critical insights and data products to both military and commercial decision makers at the speed of need. We are pleased to fly with SpaceX, a proven launch service provider to further enable the PredaSAR constellation vision of rapid, persistent ISR, anytime and anywhere.”

“We are eagerly looking forward to launching PredaSAR’s constellation with SpaceX, a trusted partner and provider of launches,” said PredaSAR Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Marc Bell. “Our satellite design has benefited from years of advanced research and development from Tyvak and allows us to bring our clients the critical, persistent data that they need.”

“For launch of the first satellite of its constellation, PredaSAR sought a reliable and schedule-certain ride on a rocket with a demonstrated record of executing launches at a high cadence,” said SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales, Tom Ochinero. “We’re proud PredaSAR selected SpaceX as its launch provider for this very important mission.”

Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) is building mission payloads for a Space Engineering Research Center at University of Southern California (USC) Information Sciences Institute smallsat program called La Jument, which enhance Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) space technologies.

For the program, four La Jument smallsats—the first launching later this year—will use Lockheed Martin’s SmartSat software-defined satellite architecture on both their payload and bus. SmartSat allows satellite operators to quickly change missions while in orbit with the simplicity of starting, stopping or uploading new applications.

The system is powered by the NVIDIA® Jetson platform built on the CUDA-X capable software stack and supported by the NVIDIA JetPack software development kit (SDK), delivering powerful AI at the edge computing capabilities to unlock advanced image and digital signal processing.

SmartSat provides on-board cyber threat detection, while the software-defined payload houses advanced optical and infrared cameras used by Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to further mature and space qualify Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies. The La Jument payloads are the latest of more than 300 payloads Lockheed Martin has built for customers.

Powering Artificial Intelligence at the Edge
La Jument satellites will enable AI/ML algorithms in orbit because of advanced multi-core processing and on-board graphics processing units (GPU). One app being tested in orbit will be SuperRes, an algorithm developed by Lockheed Martin that can automatically enhance the quality of an image, like some smartphone camera apps. SuperRes enables exploitation and detection of imagery produced by lower-cost, lower-quality image sensors.

Bringing Four Satellites Together
The first of the four La Jument smallsats is a student-designed and built 1.5U cubesat that will be launched with a SmartSat payload to test the complete system from ground to space, including ground station communications links and commanding SmartSat infrastructure while in-orbit.

The second is a 3U smallsat, the size of three small milk cartons stacked on top of each other, with optical payloads connected to SmartSat that will allow AI/ML on-orbit testing.

Finally, two 6U cubesats are being designed jointly with USC that will be launched mid-2022. The pair will launch together and incorporate future research from USC and Lockheed Martin, including new SmartSat apps, sensors and bus technologies.

Lockheed Martin’s more recent smallsat projects include Pony Express 1, Linus, NASA’s Lun-IR, Janus and Grail. Additionally, Lockheed Martin will be the prime integrator for DARPA’s Blackjack small sat constellation.

Executive Comments

“La Jument and SmartSat are pushing new boundaries of what is possible in space when you adopt an open software architecture that lets you change missions on the fly,” said Adam Johnson, Director of SmartSat and La Jument at Lockheed Martin Space. “We are excited to release a SmartSat software development kit (SDK) to encourage developers to write their own third-party mission apps and offer an orbital test-bed.”

“We were able to design, build and integrate the first payload for La Jument in five months,” said Sonia Phares, VP of Engineering and Technology at Lockheed Martin Space. “Satellites like this demonstrate our approach to rapid development and innovation that lets us solve our customers’ toughest challenges faster than ever.”