Collaboration Aims for Picture-Perfect Earth Imagery
Ascending Node Technologies and Pinkmatter Form Alliance
A strategic alliance has been formed between Ascending Node Technologies and Pinkmatter to help ensure smallsat Earth observation (EO) missions in low Earth orbit (LEO) get the accurate scientific data they need from space.
“This alliance between Pinkmatter and Ascending Node Technologies focuses on Earth observation missions, providing the essential steps from acquisition planning to producing image products ready for downstream analytics."
Stefan de Klerk, Pinkmatter
The collaboration will ensure that observation satellites traveling at 29,000 kilometers-per-hour can leverage Ascending Node Technologies’ Spaceline suite of web-based data analysis, geometrics, and visualization tools to rehearse and simulate fly-overs days, weeks, even months in advance of performing the actual precision observation of a specific target on Earth.
The raw observation data is then sent from the satellite to Pinkmatter’s cloud-based FarEarth software, which will perform sensor calibrations and automatically process and correct raw downlinked data into map-ready imagery that is stored in a user-friendly archive. The accuracy of the ANT’s Spaceline observation scheduling and simulations together with the ability of Pinkmatter’s FarEarth system to create high-quality image products that provide continuous sensor calibration and satellite performance monitoring delivers EO mission success.
The combination of complementary capabilities gives Earth observation teams the confidence they need to invest in developing, launching, and flying game-changing missions that will deliver accurate and defining observations that come with the best automated visualization technologies and calibration solutions in the industry.
“A picture is worth a thousand words, but only if your mission has the scientific scheduling and processing capabilities to deliver accurate imagery and data that your observation team set out to capture with a spacecraft scanning across the Earth’s surface at eight kilometers-per-second,” explains Sanford Selznick, chief software architect for Ascending Node Technologies. “Our collaboration with Pinkmatter enables Earth observation missions of all sizes to successfully schedule and execute their critical operations using Spaceline to make the most of their incredibly short, split-second timing windows for optimal imagery.”
“This alliance between Pinkmatter and Ascending Node Technologies focuses on Earth observation missions, providing the essential steps from acquisition planning to producing image products ready for downstream analytics. Pre-processing is essential for small satellites and FarEarth does this all at scale,” said Stefan de Klerk, Pinkmatter’s Chief Commercial Officer.
More than one-thousand observation satellites are orbiting the Earth today, and many will fail to gather the mission-critical imagery they need due to flight path miscalculations that cause camera-equipped spacecraft to miss their intended targets. Operational mistakes can prove very costly, given the price of building and launching observation satellites and the immeasurable losses resulting from unusable or inaccurate imagery for critical missions, such as monitoring coastal erosion, suburban sprawl, crop harvest comparisons, or an adversary’s position.