Vancouver-based EarthDaily Analytics said Monday that NASA has awarded it a task order worth about $4.2 million ($US 3 million) to test whether imagery from its new satellite constellation is accurate enough to use with Landsat, the U.S. government’s half-century record of Earth’s land surface.
The task order is under the Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI) commercial transition initiative, run jointly by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which operates the Landsat satellites and their archive. Scientists at both agencies will check EarthDaily’s data against Landsat’s standards for calibration, stability and geometric performance. They will also process it with the same systems the agencies use to turn raw Landsat and Europe’s Sentinel-2 imagery into ready-to-analyze data.
Agency scientists want to know whether the data can yield Landsat-grade surface reflectance, the share of sunlight the ground reflects once the atmosphere’s effects are stripped out, and surface temperature. NASA’s procurement notice adds higher-level products, such as vegetation indices and evapotranspiration, the water that soil and plants give off. The release says the work will also look at products prepared for machine-learning systems.
“To understand change, you first need measurements you can trust and compare over time,” chief executive Don Osborne said in the company’s release. EarthDaily and agency staff will review findings together as the work goes on. The release does not say how long the task order runs or when results are due.
NASA selected EarthDaily as its only source in July
A July 22 notice on SAM.gov, the U.S. federal contracting portal, said NASA headquarters intended to award EarthDaily Analytics USA, the company’s U.S. arm in Maple Grove, Minn., a sole-source contract for the SLI work. NASA cited the rule that lets it skip competition when only one responsible source can meet its needs. Other companies had until Aug. 6 to show they could do the job, and NASA said it would use any responses only to decide whether to open a competition.
The notice lists what NASA is buying: about 110,000 scenes, most of them multispectral and short-wave infrared, drawn from new collection and EarthDaily’s archive. It also covers work to improve processing pipelines, reprocess data as requirements change and develop new capabilities. It does not give a value.
NASA went ahead with EarthDaily as its sole supplier for the work, a definite plus for the company if it can deliver.
EarthDaily’s government wins have come from U.S. intelligence and Ottawa
NASA has put about two dozen companies on its Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) contract since 2023, the multiple-award vehicle the agency uses to buy commercial satellite data for Earth science research. They include Planet Labs, Airbus and two Canadian firms, Montreal’s GHGSat and MDA’s geospatial arm in Richmond, B.C. EarthDaily is not among them, although the July notice was issued under the CSDA program’s name.
In May, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates American spy satellites, gave EarthDaily a contract to evaluate its multispectral imagery for possible national security use. That followed an eight-figure data subscription with an unnamed U.S. defence contractor in April. At home, EarthDaily joined the federal government’s satellite-imagery standing offer in September and is building a border-monitoring platform that uses artificial intelligence for the RCMP under a Defence Research and Development Canada contract.
NASA wants commercial help with water and burn maps first
The initiative comes as NASA studies cheaper ways to keep Landsat imagery flowing alongside Landsat Next, the planned successor to Landsat 8 and 9. In a strategy posted in September, NASA and USGS listed the first products they want commercial suppliers to help with, which USGS calls “quick wins”: bathymetry, or water-depth mapping, surface water extent, burned area and burn severity.
Eight of EarthDaily’s 10 planned satellites are now in orbit, covering all of Earth’s landmass every other day, according to the release. Their imagers span visible light to thermal infrared, with dedicated bands to help correct for water vapour and spot cirrus cloud.
EarthDaily’s visible and near-infrared pixels are 5 metres across, six times sharper than Landsat’s 30 metres. Its short-wave infrared bands, which burn mapping relies on, are about three times coarser than Landsat’s. The evaluation will look at whether combining EarthDaily’s data with government satellites could improve spatial resolution and revisit frequency, the release says.
The findings will shape the rules for commercial Landsat data
NASA and USGS will use what they learn to set the requirements commercial data, and products derived from it, would need to meet before joining the Landsat archive, according to the release. NASA says it will announce any future buying under the initiative through the usual federal procurement channels.
The White House’s 2027 budget request proposes building one final government Landsat satellite and then moving the program to a commercial solution in phases, SpacePolicyOnline reported. It asks for about $153 million ($US 109 million) for that transition.
NASA and USGS say commercial data would complement continuing government Landsat operations, and that government buying would lower companies’ risk and grow the market for Landsat-quality data. Congress, which funded Landsat Next in its 2026 budget, has the final say.