Hydrosat announced a follow-on contract with the NRO yesterday, giving the DoD and intelligence community access to the company’s thermal imaging data through the NRO’s strategic commercial enhancements program.
The deal is a follow-on to a $1.2M Stage 1 contract Hydrosat won in 2023, which tasked the company with performing modeling and simulating services.
Since then, Hydrosat has placed two sats in orbit—VanZyl-1 and VanZyl-2. The Stage 2 contract will give the NRO access to thermal data for a combined 10M+ sq km of the Earth imaged every day.
Night’s watch: Pieter Fossel, Hydrosat’s CEO, told Payload the thermal data will let government customers maintain a watchful eye on adversaries at all hours of the night.
“A lot of the bad guys only do things that are going to create a lot of intel interest at night, when they know that optical satellite systems aren’t able to image,” Fossel said. “Thermal data takes the cover of darkness away from the adversary.”
The thermal data also gives US defense forces increased data for mission planning. For example, by using data on the thermal signature of soil, planners can anticipate whether a given area will be frozen solid, or muddy, and whether or not the ground will be conducive for helicopter landings.
So hot right now: Hydrosat’s first two sats launched just 10 months apart, but saw a significant improvement in the amount of thermal data collected. VanZyl-1 launched in August 2024 and can image 2.5M sq km of the Earth every day. VanZyl-2, which launched on Transporter-14 this June, can cover more than 8M sq km in the same time period.
The company’s goal is to continue building up its dataset of thermal images. Thermal images can be converted into maps with numerical temperature values, giving AI models easier inputs to track changes on the ground without too much human intervention.
Hydrosat plans to improve both the daily imaging capacity and the resolution of the images captured on its future spacecraft.
