Showing its faith in GHGSat’s data, NASA has awarded the company a fixed-price blanket purchase agreement over a five year period.
In making the announcement, NASA said that each call issued for data is not exceed US$7 million.
NASA said that GHGSat will “provide commercial small constellation satellite products for evaluation to determine the utility for advancing NASA’s science and application goals.” Specifically that data will consist of “a comprehensive catalogue of Earth Observation data High Resolution Gas Detection Commercial Earth Observation Data products.”
NASA added that they “will assess and evaluate these small constellation satellite data products with the purpose of augmenting and/or complementing NASA-collected data in the future. To facilitate standard scientific collaborations, NASA requires End User License Agreements to enable broad levels of dissemination and shareability of the commercial data with the U.S. government agencies and partners.”
The news comes at good time for GHGSat as its constellation begins to shape with six satellites on-orbit with another three set to launch in the coming months. Those will be joined by three new 16U Spire satellites that will host GHGSat payloads and which are set to launch in 2023. This would give GHGSat 12 satellites from which to pull data from which is what that they had originally planned for their initial constellation. Another payload to detect carbon dioxide emissions was meant to be integrated on another GHGSat owned satellite, however the company is reevaluating what platform it will be on, whether their own, or hosted such as the recent deal with Spire.