Our Mission
We are a space-robotics company. We design, build and manage high altitude platforms for persistent observation, communication and control.
Alternatives to CubeSats
CubeSats are pico-satellites that measure just 10 x 10 x 10 cm (1U) (or 10 x 10 x 20 cm (2U) or 10 x 10 x 30 cm (3U)).They are typically carried into space inside spring-loaded P-POD launchers as ballast on large rockets and, once in low-Earth orbit, the CubeSats are ejected overboard. Although CubeSats are tiny and relatively inexpensive, they can still require tens of thousands of dollars to develop and many months to build and test. They also depend on orbital launch opportunities which remain quite rare, even if offered for free by launch providers. To address the limitations of CubeSats, we design, build and deploy stratospheric balloons with observation and communication payloads.
When selecting any piece of technology for your mission it is important to be aware of costs, lead times, integration and testing requirements, as well as the physical requirements of your system.
In addition, some of the key performance criteria to consider when assessing payloads to see which could suit your needs:
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Spatial resolution – a measure of the smallest object that can be resolved by the optical payload.
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Spectral resolution – the number and width of spectral bands that the sensor can collect from reflected radiance.
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Swath – the area imaged by the optical payload.
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Radiometric resolution – this indicates how much information is in a pixel and is expressed in units of bits.
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SWaP factor – the size, weight and power of the satellite or sub-system.
We build a variety of imaging and communication payloads to suit various mission profiles.
