06 May 2019
SaraniaSat wins $5M NASA InVEST contract for hyperspectral thermal imager
Member of Colorado Springs’ Catalyst Accelerator inaugural cohort is first to win government contract.
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SaraniaSat, an aerospace start-up in Los Angeles, won a three-year, $5.1 million NASA In-Space Validation of Earth Science Technologies (InVEST) contract to test and advance the company’s Hyperspectral Thermal Imager (HyTI), being touted as a unique, disruptive technology for hyperspectral remote sensing, a technology also known as imaging spectroscopy used to detect and identify minerals, vegetation, and manmade materials.SaraniaSat’s HyTI is one of three proposals selected for funding from among 25 received in response to NASA’s solicitation for the In-Space Validation of Earth Science Technologies (InVEST) program element A.49 of ROSES (Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences) 2017, supporting the Earth Science Division (Solicitation NNH17ZDA001N). Read more: NASA invests in aerospace start-up, university projects on CubeSat platform
Dr. Tom George, SaraniaSat CEO/co-founder and a former NASA scientist, serves as principal investigator of the Hyperspectral Thermal Imager (HyTI) space mission funded by NASA. SaraniaSat is one of six companies that participated in Colorado Springs’ Catalyst Accelerator inaugural cohort and the first cohort member to win a much-coveted government contract, officials say.
The Catalyst Accelerator is a defense and national security industry accelerator, headquartered on the Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation in Colorado Springs, Colo. The accelerator’s mission is to promote technology advancement for the warfighter and guide technology transfer from the government to the commercial market and vice versa. Its inaugural cohort, in which SaraniaSat and George took part, pursued solutions to terrestrial weather problems from January to April of 2018. The next cohort will be working on positioning, navigation and timing, GPS alternative technologies, and is slated to arrive on campus in September 2018.
SaraniaSat’s HyTI technologies that will be space validated for the first time via LEO flight are:
- Hyperspectral Imager
- TIR Imager Focal Plane
- High-Performance Onboard Computing
SaraniaSat performs hyperspectral remote sensing, collecting imagery of the land surface using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) or drones, other aircraft, and satellites. This information is then analyzed according to the needs of the clients, such as the agricultural industry, which looks for early detection of drought, lack of nutrients, fungal and insect infestations, changes in soil conditions, and other actionable information needed to maintain the health and well-being of vast acres of crops. These early warning signs are buried in a mass of hyperspectral imagery data continuously created in the process of monitoring large land surfaces.
Handling this kind of Big Data is a challenge for satellites, which rely on radio waves of limited bandwidth to transmit data to earth. SaraniaSat’s unique solution – which is both a hardware and a software solution – includes processing all this data onboard the satellite using a supercomputer and transmitting the highest-priority, actionable output to Earth first, making hyperspectral remote sensing truly feasible for many verticals, including the military, who can use it to track both assets and enemy activities from space.
“Catalyst was literally a catalyst, because without them we would never have been able to submit this proposal,” George says. “You know how they say, ‘It takes a village?’ It definitely took a village to get this proposal right. There are so many ‘I’s to dot and ‘T’s to cross; any mistakes and the government rejects it outright. We could handle writing the technical part of the proposal, but there was so much else!
“Catalyst Accelerator offered us many great resources: PTAC [Procurement Technical Assistance Center] generated the very valuable compliance matrix, and SBDC-Boulder [Small Business Development Center, Boulder, Colorado] helped us in several ways, including funding for professional assistance in producing the financial budget documents. We could not have done it without the full support of everyone!” George adds.
