Albedo, a company building an ultra-high resolution, low-flying satellite constellation, won a $1.25 million government contract to support the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). The Direct to Phase 2 (D2P2) SBIR contract through AFWERX, the innovation arm for the Department of the Air Force, will test and evaluate Albedo’s commercial leading, 2 meter GSD (Ground Sample Distance) Thermal Infrared (TIR) imaging for nighttime conditions for the U.S. Government.
Albedo will natively co-collect the highest-resolution commercial satellite imagery available in the visible (10 cm GSD) and thermal infrared (2 m GSD) spectrums. This is Albedo’s second D2P2 contract award through AFWERX in under a year, increasing the company’s government contract total to $2.5 million. The previously awarded effort is evaluating how Albedo’s NIIRS 7 visible imagery and co-collected TIR imagery supports various government use cases by understanding system performance, mission effectiveness, and how best to integrate their task-oriented constellation with government systems.
Under this contract, Albedo will characterize its night-time TIR imaging capabilities. This includes highly detailed lab characterization of the flight sensor, validating of end-to-end radiometric and image quality predictions, and generation of high-fidelity simulated imagery from new high-resolution aerial imagery collected with the flight sensor. Albedo will also explore constellation capacity to provide this imagery and combining all of the findings to identify the most promising U.S. Government use cases.
