The first-ever image of the earth captured by a satellite was in 1957. It took 40 minutes to download and the image of the north-central Pacific Ocean is more akin to a Rorschach test than an oceanic perspective, but it was significant and it was a start.

Sixty years later with close to 6,000 satellites orbiting the earth at any one time, it’s now said that the American military has the ability to take satellite images with such precision that the insignia of an individual soldier can be identified. 

Traditionally space has been the domain of large institutions like Nasa, Roscosmos, and the European Space Agency, which have large budgets and massive satellites, but over the last decade, the emergence of private and commercial space ventures have introduced the concept of NewSpace and changed the industry. 

NewSpace has provided easier access to space, through cheaper launch systems and the use of off-the-shelf commercial products rather than specifically designing new parts for each individual mission. This has considerably sped up and democratised the process of getting satellites into space. 

Now smaller satellites, the size of cereal boxes, are being launched in constellations and are orbiting the earth every 90 minutes, travelling at a speed of 25,000km per hour. 

These constellations are taking continuous images of the earth and are allowing a wider view of the earth at any one time.

It is projected there will be 100,00 satellites in orbit by the end of this decade and the space economy, which includes Telecoms services like Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlinks, is projected to reach $1 trillion by the end of this decade. 

Better vision

Looking for its place in the global space industry an Irish start-up, working out of DCU Alpha, has developed a machine learning chip that can process images taken by a satellite onboard.

 It can then filter through these images to find the relevant ones and downlink only these images to the user, saving on bandwidth and reducing time and costs. 

Ubotica’s chip can capture hyperspectral images, which means it can measure different wavelengths and allow for the identification and characterisation of materials. 

“Using hyperspectral imaging you can do some cool analysis to extract information about the health of vegetation, for example,” Aubrey Dunne, co-founder and chief technology officer, told The Currency.

“So you can see vegetation stress from these images, before the distress becomes apparent on the ground by monitoring the values in the different channels.”

Ubotica’s image processing could also be used to monitor illegal fishing, or an oil slick, and it can send images and information back to earth in real time, enabling quick reaction times from relevant parties.

In the podcast Dunne talks through the different business models for the satellite industry, and how companies and countries can access data. In particular he notes that the European State Agency, through its taxpayer funded Copernicus programme makes satellite imagery open access and the biggest user of this data is Google through its Sentinel hub. 

Internet of Eyes

To date, Ubotica has raised €‎4 million in a seed funding round led by Atlantic Bridge, with investment from the US based Dolby Family Ventures and Seraphim Space, one of the world’s leading investors in Space.

The investment will be used to grow the team and to develop Ubotica’s technology. 

Ubotica’s pathway to this point was not linear, it originally started as a project within Movidius, the Irish maker of low power processor chips for computer vision, that was sold to Intel for €‎300 million euro in 2016. 

Most of Ubotica’s founding team came from Movidius, including Dunne, Fintan Buckley, chief executive officer, Sean Mitchell, chief operating officer, and David Moloney, chief scientist. 

“The original concept was to take the Internet of Things and add vision to it,” Dunne said. 

“So to add a camera sensor onto a really small board about the size of two credit cards and to capture images on board and to process those images using the Movidius technology onboard. It’s battery powered, so it is very small and very power efficient.”

The applications are wide and varied and the newly formed Ubotica team tried out different demonstrators for it, including an audio guide for an art gallery in Vienna. 

When a user faced a painting the chip, which was on a pair of headphones, could recognise the piece and give the appropriate informational audio and when the user turned it away it would stop. 

The potential of the technology and especially how little energy it needed to run was picked up on by the European Space Agency (ESA), who wanted to fly the chip into the earth’s orbit. 

“The ESA were looking at the time for opportunities for AI processing on satellites and they took notice of us and the power performance, and wanted to know whether it could be used for satellites,” Dunne said. 

Most equivalent satellites require 10 watts or more of power but Ubotica requires a single watt, or less power than it takes to run a mobile phone. And that power efficiency was a huge draw for the ESA, as the only way for a satellite in orbit to recharge its batteries is from its solar panels, which is only possible when the sun is shining on them. 

Cosmic radiation

“The European Space Agency said to us, if you want to engage further with us, we have to prove that this technology is suitable for flight. So we ended up doing five different rounds of radiation testing in different centres in Europe, including in CERN.”

“When you put semiconductors in space they can interact with cosmic radiation in ways that are unpredictable, and can cause the electronics to fail or the semiconductor to have what are called latch-up effects.”

The irony of taking a tiny chip to be tested in the world’s largest machine in CERN- the Large Hadron Collider- which has a 27 kilometre circumference was not lost on Ubotica’s team. 

“We spent 34 hours in a bunker underneath the Large Hadron Collider, and we basically fired ions at the electronics and tested to see if it continued to work or at what point it stopped working and failed. And as much as it was a very long weekend, it was very successful.”

To date, Ubotica has launched one satellite, which was ESA funded and effectively proved its technology in space giving the company what is known as “flight heritage”, according to Dunne. 

And over the next year, it has three missions launching, one with ESA and two with OpenCosmos- the UK based company that specialises in satellite manufacturing, testing, launch and in-orbit exploitation. It is also working with commercial partners, but Dunne won’t comment on these as yet.

Space Junk

As the economy grows and more satellites are being launched, one of the biggest concerns facing the space industry is “space junk” or debris left in the earth’s orbit. 

“Congestion is an issue that’s been getting a lot of attention in the last two years, from a regulatory point of view and from a technology point of view,” Dunne said. 

“The ESA are putting quite a lot of money into projects, exploring options for in-orbit, debris detection, and in-orbit, manoeuvre management to avoid collisions in space. 

And this really becomes more and more of an issue as more satellites go up. Space is a large place but the real issue is that if there is a collision, and if two satellites, for example, smash into each other, the debris that that creates, will spread a lot further and will have the impact or the potential to impact on a lot of other orbits of a lot of other satellites. And it’ll have a chain reaction effect.”

Dunne goes into more detail on the potential for space collisions and what is being done to ward off potential disasters on the podcast.

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