Vancouver-based space software and analytics company EarthDaily Analytics has been awarded a contract from the Canadian Space Agency’s (CSA) Space Technology Development Program(STDP) of up to $750,000 in order to create data analytics tools.
These awards were given under the CSA’s Earth Observation Service Continuity Initiative, and are intended to find ways to “ensure continuous access to satellite radar Earth observation imagery beyond the lifetime of the [RADARSAT Constellation Mission].” EarthDaily’s specific award was to build “Autonomous Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Quality Validation Tools.” The CSA’s announcement page said that “as the quantity of [Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery] data is expected to increase, the CSA is looking at developing a tool that will automatically control their quality and report to users any potential issue.”
EarthDaily is one of two companies developing these tools, with the other being MDA.
We reached out to Christopher Rampersad, EarthDaily VP of Engineering. In a phone and email conversation, he talked about the award and how it reflects changes made to the now-software-focused EarthDaily Analytics after they were formed by Antarctica Capital from resources left behind after the bankruptcy of Urthecast in 2020. He also spoke at length about their upcoming satellite constellation.
Automatic Quality Assurance for Imagery
Rampersad explained that the award was focused on “helping reduce or eliminate the product delivery delays and backlogs that are due to quality issues” with RCM-based data. While Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a powerful tool, the data and imagery can be difficult to process or interpret, and there are often inevitable ambiguities in the imagery that can be difficult to discover and manage.
At the moment, Rampersad said, discovering those problems “is a time-consuming manual process”, so the CSA is “looking for a more automated approach to assessing the quality and feeding that back into their calibration system”. That will allow them to “maintain the quality without delays in delivering products”.
The tools that EarthDaily is developing are focused on identifying these potential issues and ambiguities, serving as a form of quality assurance. Rampersaid said that they will be “quantifying some of the characteristics and qualities of the data,” including “things like the geometric accuracy, the focusing of the SAR product, the radiometry, and the polarimetry.” By gathering these metrics, their tools “will produce reports and information that can feed back to the CSA” in order to resolve any issues before they go out to customers, without requiring any more time-consuming and expensive manual review than necessary.
Rampersad said that the tools can also help prevent these issues in the first place, by giving them information on “how they can control the satellite itself, the steering of the antenna, or timing of the pulses.”
EarthDaily’s Focus on Software
To Ramparsad, this award’s focus on software solutions reflects the key distinction between EarthDaily and UrtheCast, the company that it was formed from.
Rampersad was part of Urthecast, much like most of EarthDaily’s software engineering team, and said that the key distinction between the two companies was focus. He said that “Urthecast had a lot of different activities that it explored”, including manufacturing custom-built satellite hardware for both optical and SAR imagery, creating high-resolution video and imagery from space (“almost a Maxar equivalent”, he said). It had cameras on the ISS, had “our own satellites out of Spain”, including both high resolution and medium resolution satellites, as well as a whole agricultural satellite analytics division. It was, as he put it, “a lot of different activities that were going on”.
After Antarctica Capital reconstituted EarthDaily, minus the SAR technology acquired by Alpha Insights in 2021, EarthDaily became a far more focused operation. It is, in Rampersad’s words, “no longer a hardware company”, no longer building or manufacturing hardware in-house. Hardware is sourced from other companies—Rampersad said that they were proud of having “smart buyers of payload electronics for the satellite structure and bus”, including aerospace engineers—but they no longer have a hardware division, and “most of our engineers are all software engineers”.
Instead, EarthDaily is more specialized in analyzing and processing satellite imagery for both human usage and for use in artificial intelligence and machine learning models. They see a variety of potential applications, including everything from “water management, to forestry, to insurance to methane monitoring”. They do have key verticals where they work on providing custom data to particular industries and “let our partners go deep”. This most notably includes the agriculture-focused EarthDaily Agro, but Rampersad said that environmental change was also mentioned as an area of interest they’ll be looking into.
Ramparsad said that, overall, their company is still “focused on software solutions” and “software technologies that wrap around Earth Observation”.
EarthDaily Constellation
That said, despite the focus on software, they’re still preparing to launch 10 satellites for their EarthDaily constellation. Rampersad said that their satellites are part of “a mission to capture very high-quality images of the Earth’s surface landmass every day.”
In line with their new software focus, and their exit of the hardware sector, they’re procuring components from “top vendors such as Airbus, ABB, and Xiphos,” and are working with Loft Orbital on integration, who “handles this aspect on our behalf.”
Because EarthDaily is aiming to capture all of Earth every day, their constellation is somewhat different than most. For one, the satellites are quite a bit larger: while still technically “smallsats”, they’re “the size of a fridge and have a mass of 200kg,” Rampersad said, making them “substantially” larger than the cubesats used by many other EO companies. These larger satellites were a “key differentiator”, according to Rampersad, as they’ll be able to “deliver exceptional Earth observation data”. In particular, their superspectral imaging satellites will have a higher resolution than many of their competitors’ hyperspectral satellites. They will feature “enhanced resolution, daily global coverage, and a broad spectrum of co-incident bands,” including visible, short-wave infrared, and long-wave infrared simultaneously.
That whole-of-Earth imaging goal also means that they’ll be launching their entire constellation nearly simultaneously. Ramparsad said that they could share that Loft Orbital is procuring a launch with SpaceX for Q1 of 2024 for part of their constellation, and while the launch date for the remaining satellites is still in play, they’re firm on finishing the job by the end of 2024. As being able to image the whole of the Earth every day is seen at EarthDaily as a key differentiator between them and other EO companies like GHGSat and Wyvern—whose EO constellations need to be specifically tasked—Rampersad sees it as vitally important that the whole constellation be aloft as soon as possible.
They aim to combine that with their terrestrial software solutions to “deliver a dataset that provides true direct-to-algorithm products,” where customers need not spend time and money on the “significant normalization” to remove location and radiometry errors. Ramparsad said that their product can even be complimentary with other EO providers, where EarthDaily’s daily coverage can be used to identify “areas of interest” for tasking hyperspectral EO satellites from companies like GHGSat and Wyvern.
Their goal is to position themselves as “the go-to choice for customers seeking accurate, reliable, and AI-ready Earth observation data.”