Ahmed spoke to ET ahead of Pixxel’s inauguration of its spacecraft manufacturing facility in the city soon. The company is nearly five years old now.
Fireflies is a constellation of satellites which will have high resolution cameras and higher collection capacity and will remain in Space for ten years. Honeybees is another constellation of satellites which will increase the resolution of images and the wavelength range of Pixxel’s satellites.
The constellation will aim to provide global coverage every 24 hours and help detect, monitor, and predict global phenomena across agriculture, mining, environment, and energy use cases. Pixxel already has three hyperspectral satellites in Space with a lifespan of three years including Anand and Shakuntala.
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The company is looking at sending 24 satellites by 2025. Phase one of both of those constellations will go up in 2024. By 2025, phase two of Firefly and Honeybee is scheduled to launch. There will be a total of 18 Fireflies and six Honeybees.
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Pixxel launched its hyperspectral imaging satellite Shakuntala with the help of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket. Launched in April last year, this satellite is aimed to monitor climate change. The third satellite Anand was launched in November 2022.Differentiated offering
Almost 1.8 years after the launch of Shakuntala and a year after Anand was launched, he said that they were getting hyperspectral data of 10 metre resolution and that there existed no other source of data in Space that could beam down data in hyperspectral resolution at hundreds of wavelengths.
“The only organisations in the world to put up hyperspectral cameras were space agencies like NASA, Isro and ESA. The challenge with them was they were more than 400 kg or 500 kg and cost more than $50 million. Each satellite took five to ten years to make. This is not something a private company would sustain making commercially,” he explained.
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The biggest gap was in the gap of satellite data resolution, he said.
“They were limited to a 30-metre resolution, which wasn’t good enough for our customers. When it launched, the Shakuntala satellite was at 10 metres in hyperspectral mode. This became the highest resolution hyperspectral satellite ever launched,” Ahmed said.
The goal was to show that the company could build small, cheap satellites in a fast-paced manner but at the same time increase the quality.
Use cases
“We have been getting high quality imagery and data from those satellites. The imagery is not just good-looking but useful like of oil and gas pipelines, farms and forests, mangroves, and mineral and mining areas. The plan was to prove the use cases first hand with actual paying customers,” he said.
He talked about how far ahead they have come in building a constellation of the world’s highest-resolution hyperspectral earth imaging satellites and the analytical tools to mine insights from the data.
Hyperspectral imaging is a sophisticated technique that captures and processes information from across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Pixxel’s hyperspectral satellites can capture images at hundreds of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum and reveal key data about the health of our planet.
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Both the hyperspectral constellation and advanced data analytics platform will give up to ten times more information compared to today’s multispectral satellites in Space and increase the spectral resolution available by fifty times, Ahmed said.
“Our mission is leveraging hyperspectral technology to build a health monitor for the planet,” he said.