A Calgary-based company received a quarter-million dollars from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to test a camera system for detecting wildfires from a suite of orbiting space satellites.
4pi Lab was only founded in late 2019 to develop technologies to lessen global warming’s impact on the environment, officials said. CSA’s Space Technology Development Program (STDP) awarded the funding just recently, allowing the young company to accelerate its plans.
“4pi Lab’s recent ‘wins’ are graduating from the prestigious and highly competitive Creative Destruction Lab startup accelerator program, and its recent CSA STDP contribution award,” CEO Stephen Achal told SpaceQ. He added that the company is fully bootstrapped, and the award eases the pressure a little.
The company is developing a set of high-performance satellites, called EPiC, to geolocate and automatically report small wildfires soon after they ignite. This system will not only be useful for managing potentially catastrophic wildfires before they get too large, but in some cases, will allow authorities to leave the wildfire alone to promote healthy forest growth.
The company’s founders have more than five decades of combined experience in designing cutting-edge Earth observation systems, Achal added, which have worked in regions ranging from deep areas of the Great Barrier Reef to the heights of the International Space Station.
The CSA’s contribution will help develop and test a preliminary 4pi project called “EPiC-lite”, which is a ground-based version of the sensors that the constellation will eventually fly in space. The test project aims to detect controlled burns up to 70 kilometres away via atmospheric detection, along with geolocating the fires. This effort will assist with work already being performed by several wildfire management agencies as well as academic researchers.
“With the STDP support, it allows us to further prove the concept, finalize specifications necessary for space deployment, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the system to fire management agencies, policymakers, stakeholders and other investors,” Achal said.
A successful ground-based demonstration will also be attractive to future investors, he noted.
“After the contract is complete, one of our next steps will be to finalize the design of the EPiC satellites. The work on the contract will allow us to have about 75 percent of the hardware designed and ‘proven’ for incorporation into the EPiC satellites. For example, the ground-based demonstration system’s custom telescope will be made with glasses, to withstand the high radiation and vacuum environment in low Earth orbit. This gives us a running start with our EPiC satellite development.”
The company hopes to send a space demonstration mission aloft in late 2023, and says the STDP contribution allows them to go to space even faster than planned. “By 2025, we target complete operational delivery of real-time early wildfire detection with our satellite constellation in orbit,” 4pi chief operating officer Tahir Merali told SpaceQ.
“Our ambitions seek to augment existing end-to-end wildfire management solutions with our proprietary detection, analysis and data-delivery mechanisms,” Merali added, saying it will complement public global datasets already in use by government and industry. As the company grows, it also aims to establish an Alberta-based centre of excellence to employ space talent in Western Canada.