NASA's Smartest Satellite Is Gone. Can Private Space Replace It?

Look down on Buenos Aires from the sky, and you can learn a fair bit about the city. It's got a lot of concrete. Also a lot of trees. There's a bright green river delta to the north, which probably explains the ruddy-brown bay to the east. But with the right camera—a hyperspectral one—you can pick up a whole lot more. New colors emerge, hidden hues your eyes and mine aren't wired to see. And these colors reflect even more detail about the scene: the gases coming out of the city, the health of the plants surrounding it, the species of algae coloring the water offshore.

Scientists love pointing hyperspectral cameras at the Earth to analyze things like crop health, or the mineral content of exposed soil. But there aren't many spectroscopic satellites in orbit: The US decommissioned one of the best, called Hyperion, earlier this year. So a private company called Satellogic wants to give scientists its data for free—the company plans to have 300 spectroscopic satellites in orbit by the early 2020s.

Hyperspectral imagery lets scientists see the world for what it is: molecules. Every rock, every crop, every building, and every one of you is made out of them, and every molecule reflects a different brand of photons. Pick up the signals from enough different kinds of light—Satellogic's orbiting imagers use 30 kinds, with wavelengths from 450 to 850 nanometers—and you can get a pretty good idea of a landscape's molecular composition.

Read more at Wired

Photo credit: NASA via Wikimedia Commons