topherhaddad

7 ms·

1.
by topherhaddad 8mo ago
TDI (time delay integration) A little more detail that we didn't get into in the post. The 3-CMG control mode we first uploaded was v1. We had plans to improve the agility with later versions. In v1, we didn't have quite enough ra
2.
by topherhaddad 8mo ago
Our business model is focused on providing VLEO systems (satellites, buses, and full mission services). But future customers may be provide image services :) Thank you!
3.
by topherhaddad 8mo ago
1. The proximity improves performance: - Range^2: imaging, other sensing, closing link budgets (data you're sending or signals you're sensing) - Range^3: SAR - Range^4: Active sensing (lidar, radar, etc) - Speed: Comms latency, ti
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by topherhaddad 8mo ago
Yes, exactly. Space safety :)
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by topherhaddad 8mo ago
Ultimately it's about the ballistic coefficient. You want high mass, low cross-sectional area, and low drag coefficient (Cd). With propulsion for station-keeping, it's challenging to capture the VLEO benefits with a regular cubesa
6.
by topherhaddad 8mo ago
The lesson there - dig multiple levels deep in supply chain Alas.. the speed & resources of a startup. But we're learning.
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by topherhaddad 8mo ago
Clarity is designed for a GSD (ground sample distance) of 10 cm. Generally the industry uses resolution<>GSD interchangeably. Agree it's not the true definition of resolution. But I'd argue the diffraction limit is an incomp
8.
by topherhaddad 8mo ago
Moving fast to make launch, we had missed a harness checkout step that would’ve caught a missing comms connection into an FPGA, and it was masked because our redundant comms channel made everything look nominal. On orbit, we fixed it by pus
9.
Postmortem: Our first VLEO satellite mission (with imagery and flight data)(albedo.com)
219 points by topherhaddad 8mo ago|72 comments
10.
by topherhaddad 8mo ago
Founder/CEO of Albedo here. We published a detailed write-up of our first VLEO satellite mission (Clarity-1) — including imagery, what worked, what broke, and learnings we're taking forward. Happy to answer questions. https:&#x2F
11.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Great question. Orbit Fab plans to launch fuel depots into space, somewhat aligned with orbits of their customers. For most cubesat/smallsat constellations, it probably does make more sense to just launch a new fleet. Our satellites wi
12.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Great question. The 3 tiers correspond to how much imagery is ordered per year, the more you order the cheaper the per unit price is. The "minimum order" corresponds to the area size on the ground for a single tasking order (a sin
13.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
The comparison shot was taken with a drone at an altitude that corresponds to our 10cm resolution. The 30cm version was obtained through downsampling the 10cm image accordingly. I wish we had a real 10cm satellite image to use, but our sate
14.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
I don't have any papers offhand, but the wikipedia page on microbolometers is great. Traditional sensors for thermal imaging are made of materials like InSb and HgCdTe, which require cooling to cryogenic temperatures in order to limit
15.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
I totally agree the 9x is somewhat marketing speak, but I do think that the way GSD has historically been characterized by the 1-dimensional measurement does not do spatial resolution improvements enough justice. Electro-optical imaging sys
16.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
It is a raw drone image. I probably should have picked a different option, as this was collected just after sunset, which gives a nice uniform lighting but also leads to more noise and some of those artifacts you mention. The resolution imp
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by topherhaddad 6y ago
Exactly. Lots of trade-offs in remote sensing. We're bullish on SAR to clean up on monitoring applications, due to the ability to see through clouds and at night. As that plays out, high res optical will be even more important for cont
18.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Glad to hear that! We have details on our coverage and specs here, https://www.albedo.space/product-specs
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by topherhaddad 6y ago
There is a ton of effort currently being put into the on-orbit servicing world. Orbit Fab is leading the way on providing the fuel depots, and a number of other companies are developing the robotics required to send servicing satellites in
20.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Great points! The GPS analogy is definitely not 1-to-1. Our main point with the analogy is this: when GPS technology was developed, there was no foresight of applications like Tinder, Uber, Pokemon Go, which all would not be possible withou
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by topherhaddad 6y ago
We appreciate you bringing this up - we’re acutely aware of the privacy implications and potential for abuse/misuse. There isn’t a straightforward or easy answer to this, but we want to be ahead of the curve and not repeat the mistakes
22.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Thanks for the suggestion! We are currently working with some partner customers on featuring their applications on our site. Quick definition of how revisit rate is used across the industry: it denotes how often a satellite has the oppor
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by topherhaddad 6y ago
100p! Human rights issues is an area where we think higher resolution will be super helpful, and we are planning to make our archive data freely available for these types of applications as well as large discounts on tasking.
24.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Great observation! One of the biggest challenges for high resolution satellite imaging, even beyond the optics, is getting all those pixels down. Fortunately, the ground station infrastructure has blown up recently with Big Tech offerings l
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by topherhaddad 6y ago
Yeah great point, there are a number of agriculture applications that have no need for this level of spatial resolution. Certain high value crops only use drones today due to the resolution, so we'll be able to support those applicatio
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by topherhaddad 6y ago
It's a good question, and I while I obviously have no definitive information on other satellite companies, I will say that spatial resolution isn't everything. The higher you go, you give up temporal resolution and area coverage,
27.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Thanks! Our initial constellation will be 24 satellites, which will enable 2-3 revisits per day to areas of interest. We used a drone to capture this image at our representative resolution (10cm), but it only captures in JPEG so there could
28.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
Al-bee-dough. Origin: it's a term for how much light is reflected off of a surface (the average for earth is 30%)
29.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
The comparison shot was taken with a drone at an altitude that corresponds to our 10cm resolution. The 30cm version was obtained through downsampling the 10cm image. Other companies could potentially drive towards higher resolution, but spa
30.
by topherhaddad 6y ago
It is rather ambiguous, apologies. Imaging is a 2-dimensional measurement, so spatial resolution improvements follow a squared nature. Our GSD will be 10cm, so we arrive at 9x by (30^2/10^2). Said another way, nine 10cm pixels will fit

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