Terra Bella Blog

SkySat-4-7 First Light

2016-09-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

Today, we’re excited to share the first on-orbit images from our four newest high-resolution imaging satellites, SkySat-4-7, which were successfully launched aboard an Arianespace Vega rocket from French Guiana on September 15, 2016. The following images of Google headquarters in Mountain View, Rome, Amsterdam, and Algeciras, Spain are untuned and uncalibrated.

This was our first multi-spacecraft deployment and we’re pleased that SkySat-4-7 has joined our three on-orbit satellites, SkySat-1-3, which have now collected over 100M images since their respective launches!

Now with the world’s largest commercial constellation of high-resolution Earth imaging satellites, we are excited to continue capturing high-cadence information about our changing world.

Onwards and Upwards!

SkySat-4 image over Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA on September 23, 2016

SkySat-5 image over Rome, Italy on September 23, 2016

SkySat-6 image over Amsterdam, Netherlands on September 19, 2016

SkySat-7 image over Algeciras, Spain on September 23, 2016

SkySat-3 First Light

2016-06-28T12:04:00.000-07:00

Last week, SkySat-3 was successfully launched aboard ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket into a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit. We captured our first image less than 72 hours after launch and are excited to share an early image of Chicago taken on June 25, 2016 at 10:40AM local time.

Since inception, we have taken great pride in the diverse, hard-working team we’ve built here at Terra Bella. Each and every member of our team has played an integral part in accomplishing this significant milestone -- from building spacecraft radios, to writing imaging analysis algorithms, to managing our growing fleet of satellites. Moments like this are a good reminder that great things can happen with a small and dedicated team.

We’d like to thank our extended team, including ECAPS, Earth2Orbit, SSL and ISRO, for helping us get to this point. Stay tuned for more (product and rocket) launch updates.

Onwards and upwards!

Ching-Yu Hu on behalf of the Terra Bella team

SkySat-3 image over Chicago taken on June 25, 2016 at 10:40AM local time
Download full image here

PSLV rocket footage from launch

Terra Bella University CubeSat Partnership

2016-04-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

Discovery, learning and fresh-thinking have shaped our culture since we began 6 years ago. While our name has changed, our values haven’t and we continue to look for ways to stimulate new ideas and empower new generations of engineers.

When we contracted to procure a Minotaur C launch vehicle in 2014, we had the opportunity to make use of the small amount of spare capacity on board. We considered everything from building a set of small technology demonstration CubeSats ourselves to selling the slots commercially.

However, it’s a tradition in the aerospace industry to support research and education by making this spare capacity available to University CubeSat programs and the idea of partnering with some of these incredible groups was what excited our team the most. These partnerships give the students and staff a rare opportunity to fly their spacecraft and provides us with an opportunity to give back to the community.

We are thrilled to announce that we have reached agreements with three University programs to do exactly this - Georgia Tech’s RANGE, University of Colorado’s MinXSS and Saint Louis University’s Copper-2 missions will all fly on our upcoming Minotaur C launch alongside Terra Bella’s second generation satellites.

Georgia Tech’s RANGE CubeSats

Georgia Tech’s Ranging and Nanosatellite Guidance Experiment (RANGE) mission seeks to demonstrate an order-of-magnitude improvement in absolute orbital position knowledge compared with traditional CubeSats and inter-satellite distance measurement with mm-level precision. Consisting of two 1.5U spacecraft flying in formation, it will achieve this using a range of cutting edge technologies including satellite laser ranging.

University of Colorado’s MinXSS CubeSat

The University of Colorado’s Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS) mission seeks to improve our understanding of the energy distribution of solar flare soft X-ray (SXR) emissions and their impact on Earth’s ionosphere, thermosphere, and mesosphere. Aside from the scientific significance, MinXSS will demonstrate a variety of technologies including compact 3-axis attitude control and a miniature and a high-performance x-ray spectrometer.

St. Louis University's Copper-2 CubeSat

Saint Louis University’s Copper-2 mission seeks to flight-test a neural network for automated event detection and response. The neural network will be trained to detect interesting and unexpected science events (in images and on-board telemetry), and the spacecraft will record these events.

All three missions also have a primary mission to stimulate and develop the next generation of students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) through hands on technical experience. CubeSat projects present a unique opportunity for these students to go through an entire engineering project lifecycle and this partnership provides them the unique opportunity to see their work fly in space.

At Terra Bella, we’re excited to work with these inspiring teams of students, teachers, scientists and engineers. We feel privileged to be in a position to give something back to the engineering community and look forward to finding more opportunities to do so in the future.

We would like to thank our commercial partners in this project - Spaceflight Services, Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems and TZero Consulting.

Posted by Jonny Dyer, Chief Engineer

Introducing Terra Bella

2016-03-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

Seven years ago, we started Skybox Imaging with the vision of a new era in space technology. Small satellites with big capabilities are no longer a dream. Today, two years and nearly 100,000 images separate us from the launch of our first satellite, SkySat-1.

As we have engaged with thousands of potential users, we have been struck over and over again by a simple truth. There is an incredible opportunity for geospatial information to transform our ability to meet the economic, societal, and humanitarian challenges of the 21st century, but satellite imagery represents only one part of the puzzle.

As proud as we are to have played a leading role in developing satellite technologies, we have realized that our vision extends far beyond boxes in the sky. As Google revolutionized search for the online world, we have set our eyes on pioneering the search for patterns of change in the physical world. In order to focus firmly on the future, we’re pursuing that vision under a new name – Terra Bella.

We will continue building spacecraft. Today, we have more than a dozen satellites under development that will continue to demonstrate state-of-the-art capabilities and are scheduled to launch over the next few years.

However, as a Google company now, we are also now working with a wide array of geospatial data sources, machine learning capabilities, and experts that we could not have imagined as an independent start up company. These resources will give us a unique ability to transform raw imagery into data to help people and organizations make more informed decisions.

In the coming year, we look forward to sharing more about the products we are developing and how users will be able to access them.

In the meantime, join our mailing list or follow our blog to keep posted about this next chapter of our journey. We’re growing our team in 2016 and are looking for new talent to tackle challenges from machine learning and data science to hardware design and flight operations, so check out our job postings on Google careers.

Onwards and upwards!

Posted by Founders—Dan Berkenstock, John Fenwick, and Ching-Yu Hu

Happy Birthday, SkySat-1!

2015-11-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

It’s hard to believe that just 2 years ago we launched our first satellite, SkySat-1. Who would have known such a new technology built by a small team would be able to pioneer the first commercial sub-meter imagery, high-resolution full motion video, and nighttime video from a small satellite. To us, SkySat-1 will always symbolize the power of camaraderie and perseverance.

To commemorate SkySat-1’s birthday, we created the montage below with over 22,500 downsampled thumbnails of images collected by SkySat-1 during its second year in space. The full, 600 DPI image, is downloadable here.

As SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 continue to capture deep stacks of beautiful images and videos across the globe, we have been busy over the last year working to leverage Google’s resources and smarts to lay the foundation to scale. Next year will be a big year for us as we prepare for the launch of 10+ next generation satellites on 3 different rockets from 3 different continents.

Onwards and upwards!

To download the full resolution version of the graphic, click here.

Close up view of the SkySat image tiles.

SkySat-1 image of Jubail, Saudi Arabia on SkySat-1’s birthday (November 21, 2015)

MapReduce for C: Run Native Code in Hadoop

2015-02-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to announce the release of MapReduce for C (MR4C), an open source framework that allows you to run native code in Hadoop.

MR4C was originally developed at Skybox Imaging to facilitate large scale satellite image processing and geospatial data science. We found the job tracking and cluster management capabilities of Hadoop well-suited for scalable data handling, but also wanted to leverage the powerful ecosystem of proven image processing libraries developed in C and C++. While many software companies that deal with large datasets have built proprietary systems to execute native code in MapReduce frameworks, MR4C represents a flexible solution in this space for use and development by the open source community.

MR4C is developed around a few simple concepts that facilitate moving your native code to Hadoop. Algorithms are stored in native shared objects that access data from the local filesystem or any uniform resource identifier (URI), while input/output datasets, runtime parameters, and any external libraries are configured using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files. Splitting mappers and allocating resources can be configured with Hadoop YARN based tools or at the cluster level for MRv1. Workflows of multiple algorithms can be strung together using an automatically generated configuration. There are callbacks in place for logging and progress reporting which you can view using the Hadoop JobTracker interface. Your workflow can be built and tested on a local machine using exactly the same interface employed on the target cluster.

If this sounds interesting to you, get started with our documentation and source code at the MR4C GitHub page. The goal of this project is to abstract the important details of the MapReduce framework and allow users to focus on developing valuable algorithms. Let us know how we're doing in our Google Group.

Posted by Ty Kennedy-Bowdoin, Platform Processing Product Manager

Nighttime HD Satellite Video

2014-11-21T13:13:00.000-08:00

People and global businesses work day and night: so, too do Skybox Imaging satellites. Today we are pleased to showcase nighttime HD video from our first satellite, SkySat-1.

*Click on the 1080p HD toggle to see this video in full resolution* Bright lights, big city: the famous Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada at night as seen by Skybox Imaging’s SkySat-1 satellite from low Earth orbit on Thursday, March 27, 2014 at 10:42 p.m. local time, complete with flashing lights and moving cars. Notable sites visible in the scene include the Bellagio Hotel and its renowned fountain lake, and Paris Las Vegas’ brightly-illuminated model of the Eiffel Tower, located near the center of the video.

At Skybox, we're busy building out pixel and information services to help individuals and companies better understand our world and make better-informed, data-driven decisions. The polar orbiting imaging satellites that power our business spend about 40% of their time in the dark, so the ability to capture video at night means we can offer our users and customers insights into change occurring around the clock.

As seen in Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) imagery from NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) mission and EROS-B night imagery from ImageSat, the signatures of economic activity are readily observable after dark in the form of nighttime lights. The presence and time-dependent changes of these can provide insight for a wide spectrum of civil, commercial, and humanitarian use cases.

Applications of nighttime satellite imagery and video include:

Energy production and consumption estimation
Coastal and maritime domain awareness for shipping, fishing and trade
Industrial facility utilization and infrastructure assessment
Trade and transport traffic pattern analysis
Humanitarian crisis support

We are excited to share this announcement today and continue working with Skybox customers and partners to advance development of this and other innovative solutions using Skybox imagery and video.

Posted by Niko Milonopoulos, Skybox Data Analyst

Introducing Skybox for Good

2014-10-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

When we started Skybox in 2009 we knew that we had a tremendous opportunity to leverage our imaging capability for positive change in the world. We would be capturing the world at high resolution and with unmatched frequency. As soon as SkySat-1 was in orbit we began monitoring sites critical to our understanding of global climate change, such as the Helheim Glacier in Greenland.

18 August, 2014 | Helheim Glacier, Greenland | SkySat-1

We also partnered with organizations like the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Signal Program, who used our imagery to help develop tools for Internally Displaced Persons camp management in Africa and the Middle East.

16 March 2014 | Yida, South Sudan | SkySat-1

I’ve always been impressed by how access to global satellite imagery through Google Earth and Maps has changed the way people see their world - from the cities they live in to faraway places. In my new role on the Google Earth Outreach team, I have been astounded by the way these tools have changed how our partners do their work and tell their amazing stories. I have also learned that one of the most frequent questions is “Can you get us newer images of this place?”

And I’m excited to say that now the answer is “YES, we can get new satellite imagery for you!” Today, at our annual Geo for Good User Summit, we announced the Skybox for Good program, under which we will contribute fresh satellite imagery to projects that save lives, protect the environment, promote education, and positively impact humanity. We’ve captured some images of Nagarkovil village in Northern Sri Lanka. HALO Trust previously cleared landmines in this area and used updated imagery to help verify that people are returning, having built 84 houses and cultivating over 40 hectares of agricultural land.

3 October, 2014 | Nagarkovil, Sri Lanka | SkySat-1 View full image in Google Maps

In this beta phase of the program, we will select a small group of organizations and provide the imagery they need to accelerate their work. The images collected for these partners are being made available publicly, under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), for everyone to see and use. We’ve already started collecting a few images, which you can see on this map. Check out the images in West Virginia, where SkyTruth and Appalachian Voices are monitoring and measuring the rapid expansion of mountaintop-removal (MTR) mining which is devastating forests and communities across Appalachia, visible in the image below, right next to the popular hiking trails of Kanawha State Forest.

2 October, 2014 | KD-2 Mine, West Virginia | SkySat-2

View full image in Google Maps

Google Earth Outreach gives nonprofits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to visualize their cause and tell their story. In the future, we hope to expand the Skybox for Good program to allow many more non-profit organizations and public interest groups to benefit from the use of Skybox data.

As part of Google, we are inspired by the opportunity to up our game and make a difference at a much larger scale.

Follow us @earthoutreach for updates as we expand the program.

Posted by Julian Mann, Skybox Co-Founder and Developer Advocate, Google Earth Outreach

The Transformation of Burning Man

2014-09-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

Burning Man takes place at the end of August every year in the barren and remote Black Rock Desert of Nevada. The weeklong festival is described by its organization as “an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance.” Earth-bound photographers have chronicled the legacy of art, technology, design, and fashion at the event over the years, but we at Skybox wanted to know if we could capture the transformation of the city from space, with our constellation of SkySats.

This is the result: A full-fledged city of population 70,000, “Black Rock City” is built up in a matter of days, experienced for a single week, and disassembled just as quickly, leaving no trace. It has an airport, a DMV, a hospital, newspapers, and a Department of Public Works.

The titular event is the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy (“the man”), which was set alight on the evening of Saturday, August 30th:

Photo: David Randall

“Theme camps” are participant-built villages that vary greatly in scale and concept - the realization of the creators’ whims and creativity:

The Burning Man organization (Black Rock City LLC) creates the infrastructure of Black Rock City, including the round Center Camp, which serves as a city center and town hall plaza of sorts. First to be set up and last to be taken down, the infrastructure of Black Rock City provides the services and structure to the event that keep it organized and safe.

“The Temple of Grace is intended to be a spiritual and sacred space for memorials, reflection, celebration, and to commemorate life transitions...The community comes to write their memorials and place tokens of their transitions, and it is burned at the end of the festival in a tradition of releasing them by the immolation of the temple.” (The Temple Crew)

Caption

Photo: David Randall

Photo: John Curley

Burning Man attracts artists, amateur and professional, who build installations at great scale and with fleeting lifespan:

Add caption

Photo: David Randall

Black Rock City is built around a unique, and trademarked, radial design:

Explore the transformation of Burning Man yourself in Google Maps Engine (Hint: Try the layers)

Jon Zemel, Product Manager, Analytics and Ground Software

IDP Camp Development in Juba, South Sudan

2014-09-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

Amid the flurry of excitement that has come with the launch of SkySat-2, we’ve been continuing to observe interesting sites around the world with SkySat-1, noting signatures of economic, environmental and geopolitical activity in some rapidly-changing areas of the world. One such location of interest is Juba, South Sudan.

This capital city of conflict-affected South Sudan has been home to thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) seeking safety from internal violence, which has persisted since the South Sudanese Civil War began on December 15, 2013. The Tomping base of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) at the Juba International Airport has provided shelter and safety to IDPs since the war’s outbreak. Using SkySat-1 data from December 2013 to July 2014, we’ve been able to observe recent changes in the IDP camp area and shelter density as populations and resources continue to evolve.

Fig. 1: IDP camp development in Juba, South Sudan from December 28, 2013 to July 12, 2014. Color-coded overlays defined in the legend depict camp aerial extent defined by the presence of temporary shelters and related camp infrastructure observed in the imagery. Pre-SkySat-1 measurements from the first three dates were acquired from the United Nations Operational Satellite Applications Program (UNITAR/UNOSAT).
The ability to take imagery of the same area over a short period of time illustrates that while the overall camp area has continued to expand, shelter densities in some areas have declined. After the initial influx, UNMISS was able to spread the IDPs out and start moving them to the nearby UN House to the south. According to Brittany Card at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI),“Remote sensing analysis of IDP and refugee camps is not only useful for those utilizing satellite imagery to monitor complex humanitarian disasters, but also for ground responders assisting vulnerable populations.”

Fig. 2: Time-dependent IDP camp development in Juba, South Sudan. See Fig. 1 for context description and key.

The animation and accompanying graph above show the growth of the camp over a period of seven months, portraying how the IDP shelters have been organized and rearranged over time. Note that the top left-hand corner only has developed during the last month or so.

At Skybox, we aim to empower decision makers - from first responders to soy bean farmers - with timely information derived from our growing constellation of highly capable small satellites. With our imagery, the possibilities are endless.

Sources:

UNITAR/UNOSAT UNMISS IDP Camp Expansion Map

Move to new UN IDP camp

UNMISS Homepage

Posted by Christina Krawec, Geointelligence Analysis Intern

Launch + 48 hours: SkySat-2 First Light

2014-07-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to showcase the first images from SkySat-2. These images of Bangor, Maine and Port-au-Prince, Haiti were taken within 48 hours of launch and are not yet calibrated or tuned.

In the last two days, we have progressed through initial commissioning activities. SkySat-2 system tuning and calibration is expected to continue for several months. SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 operations are conducted from our 24/7 mission operations center in Mountain View, CA.

With the SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 constellation we are excited to continue pushing the envelope for increasingly timely high-resolution imagery, HD video, and analytics.

We are incredibly proud of our team that has worked tirelessly to turn a concept of a satellite design on a napkin, to a clean room with two satellites, to the early stages of a constellation in orbit. Each person has played an important role in getting us to this point and the team's signatures are engraved on the inside panel of SkySat-2, now zipping around the Earth at 7 kilometers / second.

Onwards!

SkySat-2 image of Port-au-Prince on July 10, 2014

SkySat-2 image of Bangor, Maine on July 10, 2014

SkySat-2 Launched!

2014-07-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

We are happy to announce the launch of SkySat-2 this morning aboard a Soyuz-2/Fregat rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. We made contact with the satellite on the first pass.

Below is an image taken by SkySat-1 of SkySat-2's launch pad on July 7, 2014 and a photo taken by Roscosmos of the Soyuz-2/Fregat rocket on July 8, 2014.

Onwards and upwards!

Skybox Imaging + Google

2014-06-08T16:04:00.000-07:00

Update on 8/1/14: The deal has now closed.

We’re thrilled to announce that Skybox Imaging has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google!

Five years ago, we began the Skybox journey to revolutionize access to information about the changes happening across the surface of the Earth.

We’ve made great strides in the pursuit of that vision.

We’ve built and launched the world’s smallest high-resolution imaging satellite, which collects beautiful and useful images and video every day. We have built an incredible team and empowered them to push the state-of-the-art in imaging to new heights. The time is right to join a company who can challenge us to think even bigger and bolder, and who can support us in accelerating our ambitious vision.

Skybox and Google share more than just a zip code. We both believe in making information (especially accurate geospatial information) accessible and useful. And to do this, we’re both willing to tackle problems head on — whether it’s building cars that drive themselves or designing our own satellites from scratch.

We are who we are because of the incredible customers, partners, & advisors who have given their time, wisdom, resources & encouragement over the years. To the people who believed in us before anyone else, you know who you are. Thank you.

In addition, we wouldn’t be here without the unwavering support of our friends and family. This has been an incredible journey, and we look forward to working with our new Google family and the world at-large to write the next chapter.

We should point out that our agreement with Google, which is subject to customary approvals and closing conditions, hasn’t closed yet. So in the short term, it will continue to be business as usual at Skybox.

Onwards and Upwards!

The Skybox Team

Monitoring Oil Reserves from Space

2014-04-08T15:01:00.000-07:00

Skybox Imaging is making it easy to monitor oil reserves and other resources from space. Oil is typically stored in tanks with roofs that float to avoid breathing and evaporative losses in the space between the top of the oil and the tank ceiling. With the roof’s moving and basic trigonometry, Skybox’s satellite images can be used to estimate the fill and volume of oil containers. The ratio of length of the tank shadow casted over the outside versus the inside is proportional to be volume of oil inside the tank.

Below is an analytics use case created by Skybox co-founder Dan Berkenstock and Skybox Product Manager Ty Kennedy-Bowdoin using two SkySat-1 images of the Ras Tanura Oil facility in Saudi Arabia leveraging Mapbox's visualization tools. Using the method described above on both images, it's possible to monitor the change in volume for each tank:

Ras Tanura Najmah compound, Saudi Arabia

Here is the math of how this works:

This method can be easily expanded. Aggregating the volume values using the radius and shadows plus sun elevation we can fill the values in the formula and estimate the overall storage for the facility and how much the ship docked on the first image could have taken on board.

Area of the cylinder: taken directly from the image since we know the resolution.
Height of the cylinder: Using the the length of the shadow on a flat surface and the solar elevation (from the time/place but also typically part of the image metadata).

Mapbox's satellite pipeline allows them to process all kinds of imagery sources into orthorectified single strips and beautiful global mosaics. Continued integration between Skybox and Mapbox will further simplify the process of accessing and analyzing timely satellite imagery.

Posted by Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño (Chief Scientist, Mapbox) and Dan Berkenstock (Chief Product Officer, Skybox Imaging)

SkySat-1 Launch Campaign: Behind the Scenes

2014-03-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

This is an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at how our team launches a high-resolution imaging satellite on a converted ICBM and flies it via Chrome browser from our mission control center. Pardon the mustaches - it was Movember.

Building the World's Most Capable Microsatellites, Part 2

2014-03-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

In Part I we explored why the time is ripe for small imaging satellites. While building SkySat-1 and the data infrastructure that surrounds it, we have developed a set of design principles that are steeped in the fast-paced, creative engineering culture of Silicon Valley but also draw extensively from 60 years of US space experience.

Here in Part II we expound upon these principles, explaining how they enable us to build phenomenally capable products within tight time and resource constraints. We start with one that sounds obvious…

Do the right thing

Finding time to do the right thing is often difficult in a cost- and time-constrained environment. But the cost of the time needed to think deeply about a problem early on or solve an issue when it first arises rather than sweeping it under the rug will pay off many times down the road.

Striking the balance between time to do the right thing and the need to move faster, faster, faster is difficult but can be make-or-break for a small organization. We challenge our team every day to do the right thing.

That dimension matters

Simplicity

There is a famous saying (often attributed to Einstein):

Make things as simple as possible but not simpler.

Starting with the goal of simplicity has huge implications as a design matures. It makes debugging and testing easier. It keeps cost down and it allows for easier evolution of the design.

Simplicity doesn’t just happen - it requires deep thought, discipline and many iterations. “Can we make it simpler?” is a question you will hear in almost every design review at Skybox.

Modularity

Modularity is an aspect of design that takes discipline and a long view, but enables fast progress in the face of uncertainty. It is absolutely necessary in a startup environment because it allows the team to react quickly to changing business requirements and postpone decisions.

A truly modular system (software or hardware) allows for change in a component or subsystem without large, system-wide impact. This flexibility makes it possible to postpone decisions until better information is available. Turns out that in a startup better information flows in every day.

Let's swap this one out

Hiring hands-on engineers that build on a modular architecture makes it cheap to try things, fail and try again. The goal of testing is not necessarily to succeed - it is to uncover points of failure early and fix them. That is how you find weaknesses in a design and create true robustness.

Our hardware engineers are itching to get out from behind a computer monitor and our software engineers build tests before they implement features. One of our core beliefs is that there’s no such thing as too much testing if you can afford it.

Where does this screw go? A little to the right…

In fact, we find excuses to integrate and test things early in a design cycle. Even if contrived, the time spent putting things together early is paid back many times over as the design matures.

Balance

Much of engineering is about striking balances. Recognizing that is an important first step. But we also need guidelines to help us in finding those balances. Here’s a snapshot of some of the balances we weigh in engineering everyday at Skybox.

Right-sized analysis

George E. P. Box wrote that “… all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Analysis is critical to design - without it quantifying the merit of design choices is practically impossible. However it is all-to-often that design teams spend inordinate time and resources on complex models that nature shows to be inaccurate anyway

Your timestep is too large

We believe one of the true arts of engineering is a right-sized model - one that balances sufficient fidelity to predict useful things while being simple enough that it is both manageable and understandable. Essentially Occam's Razor applied to analysis. Interestingly, there are actually hard statistical arguments that smaller models are better.

The best models guide the designer’s intuition and help them make decisions.

You can’t do everything yourself… Do everything yourself!

This is one of the hardest balances for us and one we wrestle with every day. We care more than anyone else about what we’re building and we have the best team in the world. So why shouldn’t we make it all?

But with a small team building a large and complex system, it is simply unrealistic to do everything in-house.

Can you hear me now?

We try to pick the important stuff - the stuff that will really move the needle - and make sure to do those things ourselves. When given a choice of two things we could make and only the resources to do one, we always pick the one that is the biggest lever. And we’ll never choose to build a piece that is a commodity - we just don’t have the time.

A corollary to this is to have good in-house infrastructure. Being able to build things ourselves enables quick hardware iteration cycles and the flexibility to pull something in-house if we need to. To that end, we’ve built lab and shop space here to make everything from quick-turn prototypes to parts that will fly in space.

Making chips

Ford or Ferrari?

Engineers love performance - squeezing as much capability out of a system as is possible. And while optimization is important for building small, tightly integrated systems with tight resource constraints, it can also lead to a fragile design.

Effective design optimization balances performance in an ideal case with resiliency in the face of off-nominal conditions.

Redundancy is NOT the root of all evil

Redundancy is a powerful tool in the fight to build a robust system. It is also seemingly in direct conflict with the simplicity maxim. Thus redundancy has become a bad word in many scaled-down aerospace systems.

We believe redundancy is a good thing, it just has to be applied intelligently. A modular architecture enables targeted redundancy without permutational complexity and we make redundancy a goal not a requirement.

The delicate balance of simplicity and targeted redundancy can lead to a robust, capable and elegant system.

Leverage other industries

In engineering if there’s an easy way out of a challenge that doesn’t compromise other principles it’s foolish not to take it.

Technical problems in one industry are often similar to technical problems in other industries. And while there are factors and constraints in what we’re doing that are absolutely unique, there are also many areas where great technologies exist in other industries that are applicable to our needs and can save a lot of time. Here are a few places where we “cheat” by pulling from other industries.

We have heavily leveraged technology from the consumer electronics, industrial automation, and automotive industries.

The consumer electronics industry has invested $100 billion’s over the past 50 years in packing miraculous technology in tiny footprints. Your iPhone is the direct beneficiary of this. Here are five technologies that are as enabling to a satellite imaging platform as they are to an iPhone:

Super-computer level processing performance in tiny space / power footprint
Sensitive, fast and high resolution CMOS image sensors
Compact, high efficiency solid state radio components
High energy-density lithium-ion batteries
Dense, fast and robust solid-state FLASH memory

Picture that

Unfortunately, the technology used in space electronics lags its commercial counterpart by 2-3 generations due to risk aversion and the cost of the traditional space-hardening processes.

Moreover, massive investment in process control has made today’s COTS parts incredibly reliable - especially those targeted at automotive or industrial applications.

One of the most critical enablers for our satellites are proprietary design, test and screening processes that enable us to fly cutting-edge COTS parts in the space environment. Commercial parts let us prototype quickly and cheaply, utilize technology years ahead of typical space missions and still have high confidence in the reliability of the system.

Conclusion

In Part III we will show how we applied these principles to the design of SkySat-1, elaborate on the way we balanced capability vs. size, and why we think the SkySat platform is right in the sweet-spot.

Posted by Jonny Dyer, Chief Engineer

In search of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

2014-03-13T10:25:00.000-07:00

We are actively tasking the first satellite of our constellation, SkySat-1, to take high-resolution images and full motion video over several targets spanning between Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh city. We are currently leveraging early SkySat-1 capabilities to collect focused area targets. As our constellation grows over the coming years, our capability to collect larger areas at higher revisit rates will increase.

We are engaging with subject matter experts and partners to analyze our images. If any glimmer of a clue emerges, we will publish any information here on our blog. Below is an interactive map created by Mapbox showing the imagery footprints from SkySat-1 and other satellite providers over the last 6 days.

Our hearts are with the families of the passengers and crew onboard.

ECAPS to Supply Green Propulsion for 12 More SkySat Satellites

2014-03-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce our continued partnership wtih ECAPS, an SSC Group Company, for 12 additional high performance green propulsion (HPGP) systems for our planned constellation of 24 high-resolution imaging and video-capable satellites.

The 12 HPGP system modules included in this new contract are to be delivered during 2015 and 2016. We previously awarded ECAPS a contract for a modular HPGP system for our SkySat-3 satellite, which will be the first of our satellites to be equipped with an orbit maneuvering capability.

“The propulsion modules will enable us to support a wide range of mission orbits to meet our customers’ demands for high-temporal, high-resolution imagery and video,” said Mike Trela, our VP of Satellite Systems, who noted that the agreement also “extends Skybox’s company culture of environmental responsibility.”

For more information on this news, please click here.

Building the World's Most Capable Microsatellites, Part 1

2014-02-28T09:27:00.000-08:00

SkySat-1 is arguably the highest performance micro-satellite ever built. Since its launch 3 months ago, it has delivered terabytes of spectacular sub-meter imagery and video - data of incredible business value - at a cost more than an order of magnitude less than comparable existing systems.

We are regularly asked how this is possible and it boils down to two pieces:

A small, tightly integrated team of incredible hardware and software engineers with diverse industry experience
A unique space system design approach and philosophy

Feb. 18 in Kiev - History seen from the sky

This is the first post in a three part series detailing the value proposition of our small spacecraft platform, the design philosophy and team that enabled it and why it is uniquely enabling for business intelligence applications.

Small is the new Big

The Skybox vision is to leverage timely satellite data to provide insight into daily global activity. Such data has wide value in industries such as agriculture, asset monitoring, security, supply chain management and many more.

Since most businesses are interested in economic activity of some kind, the most valuable data is that which can monitor at the economic scale (under 1m) and temporal scales (daily). Existing Earth Observation (EO) systems have not met the need of many business applications because they lack the critical combination of timeliness and sub-meter resolution:

Satellite Performance Frontier

The cost of satellite data

Space assets are traditionally:

Extremely Valuable
Extremely Expensive
Extremely Risky

They are valuable ( and probably always will be) because satellites are unique in type, quantity and global nature of data and services they can provide.They are expensive and risky because getting to space and doing interesting things there is hard.

Alphasat - a lot of eggs (and capital!!) in one basket

“Small-Sats” (micro-, nano-, pico-satelites, etc) are a reaction to the enormous expense of traditional
aerospace. Because launch costs are a significant fraction of a satellite deployment cost, simply making satellites smaller is a first step in breaking the inflationary cost cycle.

But smaller alone does not a revolution make. To truly “move off the curve”, small satellites must also pack huge capability into tight mass, power and cost constraints.

Small is the new Big

Today’s traditional, large spacecraft CAN capture data at the high resolution needed to monitor global human activity but because of their enormous capital cost (and, hence, limited numbers), they produce data too infrequently to enable many monitoring or change detection applications.

Today’s micro- and nano-sats can be launched in quantity because of their lower cost but can’t produce data with high enough resolution to monitor economic-scale change (cars in parking lots, ships in ports, supply chain monitoring, …).

To move off the frontier, a system must both capture data of high enough quality (resolution) to show economic activity and be cost-effective enough to deploy in large numbers (timeliness).

So why Small-Sats again?

Bubble of opportunity

The commercial micro-electronics revolution and Moore’s law have pushed the green line up disproportionality at the smaller end of the spacecraft scale while economics of launch, capital financing and risk aversion in aerospace have pushed the cost up sharply at the larger end. Over the last 20 years, a “bubble of opportunity” has arisen in the nano- and micro-satellite scales.

So we ended up asking ourselves the question “What’s the smallest box I can fit something of real commercial value into?”. We spent the first 3 months of the design of SkySat-1 trying to answer this question, carefully balancing the state of the art and the realities of physics.

The answer came by combining tightly integrated system architecture, modularity in both hardware and software, techniques that allow us to leverage the incredible performance of modern commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components in space and the best engineering team in the industry.

SkySat-1 "Off the Curve"

Stay tuned to Part II where we will discuss our unique design philosophy and how it enables the Skybox space and data platform. In Part III we discuss what we look for in engineers and how we built our exceptional team and in Part IV we will elaborate on the way we traded capability vs. size and why we think the SkySat platform is right in the sweet-spot.

Posted by Jonny Dyer, Chief Engineer

Vandenberg, Here We Come!

2014-02-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

As our team continues working toward the launch of our planned constellation of 24 satellites, we have a huge development to share: we’ve signed a commercial launch contract with Orbital Sciences Corporation.

Orbital will launch six of our commercial high-resolution imaging and video-capable satellites into a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit aboard the Minotaur-C space launch vehicle. These satellites are designed to deliver <80 cm resolution.

The launch is scheduled from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base late next year and we couldn’t be more thrilled. More details can be found here.

Our Partnership with SSL to Produce 13 Satellites

2014-02-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

Today we’re announcing a new partnership with Space Systems/Loral (SSL) / MacDonald, Dettwiler, and Associates, Ltd. (MDA) to build 13 satellites to be launched in 2015 and 2016. This is a watershed moment for us as we look to scale our constellation – once these are up, we’ll be able to revisit any point on Earth three times per day.

The satellites, which will weigh roughly 120 kilograms each with dimensions of 60x60x95 centimeters, will be built based on our prototypes, designs and specs. Similar to SkySat-1, the satellites built by SSL will capture sub-meter color imagery and up to 90-second clips of HD video with 30 frames per second.

We will continue to prototype new generation systems in-house while leveraging SSL/MDA's production capabilities to deploy our constellation with greater speed and cost efficiency.

To read more about our partnership with SSL/MDA, please click here.

Vegetation Analysis Via SkySat-1 Near Infrared Imagery

2014-01-15T09:02:00.000-08:00

SkySat-1 collects imagery using 5 channels: blue, green, red, near infrared (NIR), and panchromatic. Everyone is familiar with the first three channels because the human eye is sensitive to this range of the electromagnetic spectrum and our brains have evolved to interpret this information intuitively. For this reason, cameras and satellite data are typical viewed in this “true-color” scheme that we see in platforms like Google Maps.

The NIR channel (740 - 900 nm) is designed to capture light in a range just beyond the visible spectrum (390 - 700 nm). To visualize a “color infrared” image we typically map the NIR channel to red, while assigning the red to the green and the green to the blue channels. This allows us to visualize the near infrared channel as red, so materials that reflect well in this wavelength range appear very red.

One of the more interesting characteristics of the NIR channel is that lush vegetation reflects very strongly relative to other materials or woody vegetation. Healthy vegetation generates more chlorophyll in the leaves, which reflects well in the NIR, while less healthy leaves are much less reflective. Many interesting metrics depict vegetation health based on ratios of the red to NIR channel.

One of the most common vegetation health metrics is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) which works well in consistently vegetated areas. The Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI) takes this metric one step further by correcting for the amount of exposed soil in each pixel in agricultural areas where vegetation is surrounded by exposed soil.

The example in Figure 1 illustrates a color infrared rendering of some center pivot irrigated fields in Saudi Arabia. Figure 2 illustrates the MSAVI results from this same dataset. I have rendered the colors to depict healthy vegetation with hot colors and less healthy vegetation in cool colors. While we could qualitatively determine that one of the center pivot irrigated fields was well watered and the others appear to be fallow in the color infrared image, we now can quantify this with metrics that can be compared throughout the seasons or years and correlated with the factors measured on the ground like water usage, fertilization, seed varieties, crop yield, etc.

Mineral deposits rich in Iron Oxide are another common source of reflective NIR values in satellite images. This can be very interesting to geologists searching for assemblages of minerals indicative of higher concentrations of valuable metals.

Figure 1: Color Infrared Image of a Center Pivot Irrigated Field in Saudi Arabia. Captured by SkySat-1 on 12/26/13.

Figure 2: MSAVI Results of a Center Pivot Irrigated Field in Saudi Arabia. Captured by SkySat-1 on 12/26/13.

Posted by Ty Kennedy-Bowdoin, Product Manager

SkySat-1 Captures First High-Resolution, HD Video of Earth from Space

2013-12-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, we shared the first images from SkySat-1, the first of our planned constellation of 24 satellites. Today, we are excited to share the world’s first commercial, high-resolution, HD video of Earth from space. The following montage showcases several of the first videos captured by SkySat-1 since early December and these videos are untuned and not yet calibrated. In this video, you will see a selection of views including Tokyo, Bangkok, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Aleppo, Syria.

Watch the video in 1080p HD resolution on the following YouTube link. Click on the 1080p HD and full screen toggles to see the video in its full resolution.

The resolution is high enough to observe objects that impact the global economy like shipping containers, but not close enough to view or identify human activity. SkySat-1 also captures some of the highest quality color imagery of any commercial satellite and is capable of sub-meter native color and near-infrared imagery. And most revolutionary, SkySat-1 was built and launched for more than an order of magnitude lower cost than traditional sub-meter imaging satellites.

This is an important inflection point showing that high-quality, high-resolution imagery data can be more timely, accessible, and affordable. By merging the Silicon Valley approach with aerospace engineering, we are pioneering a game-changing platform and a new generation of applications for the remote sensing industry and for new markets yet to be realized.

With our ability to capture up to 90 second video clips at 30 frames per second, we are now able to gather dynamic information about the world around us at an unprecedented scale. There’s an immense amount of knowledge that we can glean from analyzing movement – supply chain monitoring, maritime awareness, industrial plant activity, environmental monitoring, and humanitarian relief monitoring – and we are excited to explore the breadth of possibilities with this unique data source.

Stay tuned, we are just getting started.

SkySat-1 First Light

2013-12-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

We are excited to share the first images from SkySat-1, the first of our planned constellation of 24 satellites.

The following images were taken over Perth, Australia, on December 4, 2013 at 10:25AM (local time) and are untuned and not yet calibrated. As you can see below, features are clearly discernible that validate our goal to provide high-quality, sub-meter imagery: car windshields, varying car colors, road markings, etc. These images exceed our early expectations for quality.

SkySat-1 is a high-performance satellite producing sub-meter resolution imagery and high-definition video that was designed and built at our headquarters in Mountain View, California. To our knowledge, SkySat-1 is the smallest satellite ever flown that is capable of capturing imagery at better than 1 meter resolution.

SkySat-1 was launched on November 21, 2013 from Yasny, Russia aboard a Dnepr rocket. We made contact with the spacecraft on the first pass and completed bus commissioning within days. Once the payload door was opened, initial images were captured within hours. We are tuning and calibrating the system and are excited to deliver more imagery soon. To watch video footage of the rocket launch, go here.

We’ll have more news to share soon. Until then, onwards and upwards!

Beaton Park in Perth, Australia

Crown Perth in Perth, Australia

Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, UAE

Somalia Coastline

Dnepr Rocket Successfully Launched

2013-11-21T08:13:00.000-08:00

We’re thrilled to announce that our Dnepr rocket successfully launched and SkySat-1 has officially reached orbit. Watch the launch footage here: