Terra Bella Blog: 2014

Nighttime HD Satellite Video

Friday, November 21, 2014

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

Posted by Niko Milonopoulos, Skybox Data Analyst

Introducing Skybox for Good

Thursday, October 23, 2014

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

CC BY 4.0this mapSkyTruthAppalachian VoicesMTR

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

View full image in Google Maps

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

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Photo: David Randall

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Photo: David Randall

Photo: John Curley

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Photo: David Randall

(Hint: Try the layers)Jon Zemel, Product Manager, Analytics and Ground Software

IDP Camp Development in Juba, South Sudan

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

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

Thursday, July 10, 2014

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!

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

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

Sunday, June 8, 2014

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

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

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

Friday, March 28, 2014

Building the World's Most Capable Microsatellites, Part 2

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

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

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

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?
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

Thursday, March 13, 2014

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

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

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

Friday, February 28, 2014

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

Small is the new Big

Satellite Performance Frontier

The cost of satellite data

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 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, …).
So why Small-Sats again?

Bubble of opportunity

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!

Thursday, February 20, 2014

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

Monday, February 10, 2014

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

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

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

Blog

Nighttime HD Satellite Video

Introducing Skybox for Good

The Transformation of Burning Man

IDP Camp Development in Juba, South Sudan

Launch + 48 hours: SkySat-2 First Light

SkySat-2 Launched!

Skybox Imaging + Google

Monitoring Oil Reserves from Space

SkySat-1 Launch Campaign: Behind the Scenes

Building the World's Most Capable Microsatellites, Part 2

In search of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

ECAPS to Supply Green Propulsion for 12 More SkySat Satellites

Building the World's Most Capable Microsatellites, Part 1

Vandenberg, Here We Come!

Our Partnership with SSL to Produce 13 Satellites

Vegetation Analysis Via SkySat-1 Near Infrared Imagery

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