SAN FRANCISCO – German startup Constellr released first-light imagery March 17 from Skybee-1, the initial satellite in its thermal-imaging constellation.
With Skybee-1 data, Constellr created a detailed map of the heat distribution for Tokyo’s buildings, parks and waterways.
“Temperature is the key environmental variable for determining human activity,” Constellr CEO Max Gulde told SpaceNews. “Looking at Tokyo, you can immediately identify how the rivers are cooling when they’re moving out of the city. You can identify industrial activity. You can see the health of infrastructure, which is tremendously important when it comes to predictive maintenance and city planning.”
Skybee-1, the first satellite in Constellr’s High-precision Versatile Ecosphere (HiVE) constellation, launched Jan. 14 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare. A second Skybee satellite is scheduled to launch this summer.
With a resoution of 30 square meters per pixel, Skybee-1’s will usher in “a new era for thermal intelligence,” Gulde said. “I am of the conviction that thermal intelligence will play a very big role in driving business decisions.”
Water and Climate Monitoring
For decades, government agencies had a monopoly on thermal-imaging satellites. In recent years, startups have raised money, built instruments and begun launching satellites to provide thermal data to farmers, firefighters, government agencies and commercial customers.
In 2023, the European Commission and European Space Agency awarded a contract to Constellr for thermal-infrared imagery. The Germany Space Agency DLR awarded Constellr a multiyear contract in September.
“Capturing land surface temperature at this level of detail will be invaluable for monitoring urban heat, water stress, and climate resilience,” Peggy Fischer, mission manager of ESA Third Party Missions and Copernicus Contributing Missions, said in a statement. “This achievement demonstrates the potential of high-resolution thermal data to support a wide range of environmental and climate applications.”
With Skybee-1, constellr will gather thermal imagery of equatorial areas every four days. The second Skybee satellite will double the revisit rate.
Digital Twin
In addition to ingesting data from its own satellites, Constellr is creating a digital twin of Earth.
“We can take low-resolution public data, calibrate it against our data and super sample it, so we have a continuous, high-resolution representation of this AI-driven model,” Gulde said. “This massively reduces the cost per produced data point, because we can interpolate between data points.”
