Home of satellite images Albedo is preparing for his up close and personal debut.
Albedo’s first satellite will enter orbit next spring as the company seeks to revolutionize the commercial Earth observation industry with its novel approach and ultra-high resolution cameras.
The satellite, called Clarity, will travel to very low Earth orbit (VLEO) on SpaceX’s Transporter-13 rideshare mission. Currently, that mission won’t launch before February 2025, so Albedo should have its first satellite operating in orbit this time next year.
Albedo also announced seven clients which booked a portion of Clarity’s imaging tasks, including satellite imaging broker SkyFi and German energy company Open Grid Europe.
“It’s an aggressive schedule,” said Albedo CEO Topher Haddad. “This is the first time we have publicly published a mock-up of a satellite. I think a lot of people probably think we’re more of a small satellite, but it’s a pretty complex robotic system with a large aperture telescope and a pretty powerful capability. “Much of that schedule was primarily driven by the custom technology we have been developing to fly a high-resolution system in VLEO.”
The startup is developing a spacecraft, the first of its kind, capable of capturing very high resolution images, operating in a very low Earth orbit; images so sharp, the company claims, that they have historically been the exclusive province of US defense and defense. Intelligence organizations.
The company says it will be able to sell 10 centimeters per pixel images to commercial and government customers. at unprecedented prices due to its unique (and quite large) satellite bus. (An image with a resolution of 10 centimeters means that each pixel covers an area on the ground the size of 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. The largest optical imaging providers today collect images with a resolution of 30 centimeters, which has been improved algorithmically at 15 centimeters.)
Satellites that do achieve 10-centimeter resolution tend to operate at higher orbital altitudes, such as low-Earth orbit, and by some estimates cost billions of dollars to manufacture and launch. Low Earth orbit is generally defined as the orbital band at an altitude of around 2,000 kilometers, while VLEO is between 250 and 450 kilometers.
Albedo’s satellites will eventually be the size of refrigerators, much larger than many other commercial Earth observation satellites currently operating even further from Earth. It seems counterintuitive to make satellites so heavy (you might think that to counteract increased atmospheric drag, it would be imperative to make them as light as possible), but Haddad said in a recent interview that the company is capable of countering that drag. . using ultra-efficient electric propulsion and particular design decisions, such as mounting the solar panels on the spacecraft instead of deploying them on two wings.
“Normally you deploy [the solar panels] because you can generate more power that way, but we needed to minimize the cross-sectional area so that mass and that electric propulsion work to counteract the drag,” Haddad explained.
As the company moves toward putting hardware into orbit, it also hired Kathryn Tobey as its first independent director on its now six-person board of directors. Tobey had a 34-year career at Lockheed Martin, where she eventually became vice president of the company’s $3 billion Space and Special Programs business line. (Before founding Albedo, Haddad started at Lockheed Martin working on some of these same systems.) That division did high-tech national security work, including classified projects, exactly the set of clients Albedo is targeting on the government side.
“She brings both superpowers, which I think is quite rare to have, both that deep technical understanding, not just of satellites, but of our unique niche of high-performance imaging satellites, and the relationship with the national security customer and the understanding of that mission very good,” Haddad said.