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[Via Satellite 03-19-2015] The influx of new capital into the satellite industry is creating an understandable amount of giddiness, but investors and entrepreneurs at the “Silicon Valley, Meet SATELLITE 2015” panel brought a down-to-Earth look at the true motivations for putting money behind space ventures.


“I don’t think there is any investment in space going on,” Peter Platzer, CEO of Spire, whose company received $25 million in Series A funding last year, said outright. “There is investment in data companies and there is investment in applications … I think people get hung up on starry-eyed stuff in space.”

The number of announcements regarding new multi-million dollar investments has experienced a notable uptick across the industry. Just this Monday a geospatial big data startup called Orbital Insight gained $8.7 million in Series A funding from a partnership with Sequoia and participation from Google Ventures and Lux Capital, among others. The week before, Spaceflight Inc. clenched $20 million in Series B funding co-led by RRE Venture Capital and Vulcan Capital, with Razor’s Edge Ventures investing as well. And a mere nine days earlier, Rocket Lab closed a Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP)-led Series B financing round, with Khosla Ventures and K1W1 investment fund supporting, along with a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin.

According to NewSpace Global Co-Founder and CEO Dick David, the reason for this explosive amount of growth can be summed up by one word: exits. Companies such as Climate Corporation, which Monsanto acquired, and Skybox Imaging, which Google purchased, have fueled investor confidence in getting appreciable Returns on Investments (ROIs) for the satellite sector.

“A lot of what’s happening is we are seeing new investors. That is why this is exciting,” he said.

“There are investors looking for financial returns,” added Akshay Patel, VP of Morgan Stanley & Co.’s investment banking division. “It’s going to be a very data-driven decision. That’s not to say the space side is not a great motivation for the business … once they are in, they are all in, but if you take Elon Musk as an example, it’s an incredible motivator for him and his company to go to Mars.”

Space enthusiasts such as Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has indisputably disrupted the launch sector, are unique in their ability to pair big dreams with big cash. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic are other examples of potentially disruptive launch companies with wealthy, passionate founders. But as new investors walk the halls of SATELLITE 2015, they are motivated by proof extracted through careful due diligence. Space for space’s sake won’t cut it.

“Venture capitalists (VCs) don’t do things that way. And thank God for people who do, but for the most part the investments in space — Planet Labs, Spire, the Nano-sat guys circling — [those are because] imagery is diligeable [and] the comms industry is diligeable,” said Steve Goldberg a partner at the VC firm Venrock.

Entrepreneurs in the satellite industry today have benefited tremendously by leveraging Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) technology, often applying Moore’s Law to cram more and more components into ever more capable SmallSats. Cloud computing and devices used for mobile phones can be and are today leveraged by satellite designers to piggyback off billions of dollars worth of Research and Development (R&D) from other fields, reducing the dangers of untested technologies in a notoriously risk-averse industry.

“Until recently you had to spend $200 to $300 million and wait two to three years just to start generating some revenue, and with a single-point launch failure possibility. That made it really hard to get the ROI and your Excel didn’t even close. You couldn’t even get to the other considerations,” said Hoyt Davidson, managing partner at Near Earth.

Now satellite companies can run through new iterations faster and implement business plans with greater confidence. This is critical for satellite startups not only to make it in the space industry but to be able to compete with terrestrial alternatives. David said this industry requires creativity unlike others because it lies at the crossroad of complex hardware and software. He highlighted more efficient electric propulsion and lower launch costs as two top priorities for improvements that would continue to foster investor confidence.

Another pressing concern with new investment activity is the relative lack of industry familiarity among VCs and others. According to Goldberg, 80 percent of the people who invested in tech companies of the 70s, 80s and 90s have left venture capital. Plus Silicon Valley’s most recent obsessions have been social media and clean technology, the latter of which was inhibited by a lack of business acumen among engineers. Goldberg advised learning how to structure a compelling pitch so that investors will not only know the potential of the technology, but also the potential to turn a profit.

“Every deal is compared against every other deal,” he added. “I realize we are investing for 10 years from now when there is an exit, but if there is activity and value creation, that’s where the heads turn.”

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(18 March 2015) With the second Copernicus-dedicated Sentinel satellite just months away from launch, ESA and France’s CNES space agency, have signed a collaborative agreement on managing and accessing Sentinel data.

The Sentinel family of satellites is being developed to meet the operational needs of Europe’s environment monitoring programme, Copernicus. The first in the fleet, Sentinel-1A, has been in orbit for just under a year while the next, Sentinel-2A, is scheduled for launch in June.

The data provided by the Earth-observing missions are freely accessible for Copernicus Services, as well as to scientific and other users.

At an event held today at ESA’s Headquarters in Paris, ESA and France signed an Understanding for the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment Cooperation, which aims to facilitate Sentinel data exploitation in the country.

Signing on Frances’s behalf was Thierry Duquesne, CNES Director for Strategy, Programmes and International Relations.

Under the agreement, CNES will set up a ‘national mirror site’ in Toulouse for hosting and distributing Sentinel data, ensuring the hosting, access and redistribution of Sentinel data for the derivation of value-adding environmental services and information.

In addition, radar data from the Sentinel-1 mission will be received at France’s Vigisat ground station in Brest under the CleanSeaNet initiative of the European Maritime Safety Agency.

“This agreement is a key element for Copernicus and an important step for its success in France,” said Mr Duquesne.

As coordinator of the Copernicus ‘space component’, ESA supports national initiatives by establishing direct and efficient access to Sentinel data, providing technical support on the setting up of data acquisition and dissemination, as well as making data processing and distribution software available to national initiatives.

“With the signature of this agreement, the use of Sentinel data across Europe is extended and the Copernicus network is growing. France is a very important partner in this thanks to its very active engagement in Copernicus and the Collaborative Ground Segment,” said Volker Liebig, Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes.

France is the sixth Participating State to sign the agreement after Greece, Norway, Italy, Germany and Finland.

(source: ESA)

ILOILO CITY, March 23 (PIA) —- The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) is planning to launch the country’s very own micro-satellite next year as part of the government’s disaster risk management program.

This is under the Philippine Scientific Earth Observation Micro-Satellite (Phl-Microsat) program which aims to hasten the creation of the Philippine Space Agency to help sustain and enhance efforts in research and development in this area.

Rowena Cristina Guevara, executive director of DOST’s Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development (PCIEERD), said the country needs a space agency and space policy to compete regionally and globally.

“The importance of satellite communication was underlined during the aftermath of typhoon Yolanda when most forms of communications were knocked off,” she said.

The Phl-Microsat is being led by PCIEERD, involving the University of the Philippines, Hokkaido University and Tohoku University in Japan, with the backing of the Japanese government.

The three year (2015-2017) budget for the program has been pegged at P840-million, with the Philippines chipping in P324-million while Japan is taking care of P515.92-million.

The micro-satellites are slated to be launched with the help of the Japan Space Exploration Agency with a data receiving station to be put up in Subic at a former communications facility used by the United States.

The data station is codenamed the Philippine Earth Data Resource and Observation or “PEDRO”.

Meanwhile, DOST Secretary Mario Montejo said the government-owned microsatellite can be used to improve weather detection and forecasts, agricultural growth patterns, and monitor forest cover and the country’s territorial borders.

“We can develop a lot more uses for the microsatellite if we keep on improving its capability to expand its applications,” he said.

He said that DOST is launching not just one, but two-micro-satellites as the country’s ambitious plan of sending its own satellites into space formally rolls out. (JCM/LTP/PIA-Iloilo)

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(March 2015) Landsat 8 satellite images made available on Amazon Web Services in humanitarian aid and education drive

Amazon Web Services has made available more than 85,000 satellite images of Earth in an attempt to bolster the firm’s commitment to climate change and humanitarian aid.

In a blog post, AWS’ Jed Sundwall said that the Landsat 8 images are accessible through Amazon’s latest Public Data Set Landsat on AWS.

Landsat 8 is an American Earth observation satellite which was launched in February 2013. The Landsat program has been running since 1972 and is the longest ongoing project to collect such imagery. Landsat 8 is the newest Landsat satellite and it gathers data based on visible, infrared, near-infrared, and thermal-infrared light.

Gold standard

Sundwall said: “Because of Landsat’s global purview and long history, it has become a reference point for all Earth observation work and is considered the gold standard of natural resource satellite imagery. It is the basis for research and applications in many global sectors, including agriculture, cartography, geology, forestry, regional planning, surveillance and education. Many of our customers’ work couldn’t be done without Landsat.”

“We hope to accelerate innovation in climate research, humanitarian relief, and disaster preparedness efforts around the world by making Landsat data readily available near our flexible computing resources.”

The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket in the Amazon S3 US West (Oregon) region.

Amazon Web Services said it has been testing its approach to the image hosting over the past few months and has been “amazed” by what some people have been able to do with the information.

Use cases

A company called Mapbox is using Landsat on AWS to power Landsat-live, a map that is always being updated with the latest imagery from NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite. The map also overlays the images with street data to provide as much context as possible. Geographic systems provider Esri has created a demonstration of how ArcGIS Online can visualise Landsat data for visualisation and analysis within a browser.

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(March 20, 2015) NASA’s C-130 aircraft, one of the fleet of aircraft maintained by Wallops Flight Facility, is almost ready for the upcoming Operation IceBridge Arctic 2015 campaign, which will begin on March 17, 2015 and run through May 22, 2015.

The C-130 was preparing for its final project test flight at dawn this morning. If all goes well, it will be leaving for Thule Air Base in northern Greenland later this week.

Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, conducted its first campaign in 2009, and has flown two campaign each year since, one to survey the Arctic and one to survey the Antarctic.

The mission of Operation IceBridge is to collect data on changing polar land and sea ice and maintain continuity of measurements between NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions.

The original ICESat mission ended in 2009, and its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in 2017. Operation IceBridge, which began in in 2009, is currently funded until 2019. The planned two-year overlap with ICESat-2 will help scientists validate the satellite’s measurements.

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NASA is beginning work on a new satellite mission that will extend critical climate measurements of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere and advance studies of the impact of environmental changes on ocean health, fisheries and the carbon cycle.

Tentatively scheduled to launch in 2022, the Pre-Aerosol Clouds and ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission will study Earth’s aquatic ecology and chemistry, and address the uncertainty in our understanding of how clouds and small airborne particles called aerosols affect Earth’s climate. PACE will be managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“Knowing more about global phytoplankton community composition will help us understand how living marine resources respond to a changing climate,” said Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist at Goddard. “With PACE, we will learn more about the role of marine phytoplankton in the global carbon cycle.”

NASA has long used satellites to observe the global ocean’s microscopic algal communities, which play a significant role in the ocean’s ecology and the global carbon cycle. PACE will provide a global view of the planet’s microscopic ocean algae called phytoplankton. Phytoplankton live in the sunlit upper layer of the ocean, producing at least half of the oxygen on Earth and form the base of the marine food chain.

Goddard will build PACE’s ocean color instrument. This PACE sensor will allow scientists to see the colors of the ocean, from the ultraviolet to near infrared, and obtain more accurate measurements of biological and chemical ocean properties, such as phytoplankton biomass and the composition of phytoplankton communities. These changes in the ocean’s color help identify harmful algal blooms.

Quantifying phytoplankton is essential for understanding the carbon cycle and tracking climate variability and change. The ocean absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide into solution at the sea surface. Like land plants, phytoplankton use carbon dioxide to create their organic biomass via photosynthesis. Phytoplankton vary greatly in their size, function, and response to environmental and ecosystem changes or stresses such as ocean acidification.

Dissolved carbon dioxide also reacts with seawater and alters its acidity. About one fourth of human-made carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean.

NASA Goddard pioneered ocean color remote sensing 35 years ago with the very first satellite observations, and the Center has been committed to supporting the science ever since,” said Piers Sellers, deputy director of NASA Goddard Earth Science. “Goddard scientists play a critical role in generating and improving core satellite data sets for the international ocean biology community. We look forward to extending this important record into the future with PACE.”

In addition to gathering data on ocean color, PACE will measure clouds and tiny airborne particles like dust, smoke and aerosols in the atmosphere to supplement measurements from existing NASA satellite missions. These measurements are critical for understanding the flow of natural and human made aerosols in the environment. Aerosols affect how energy moves in and out of Earth’s atmosphere directly by scattering sunlight, and indirectly by changing the composition of clouds. Aerosols also can affect the formation of precipitation in clouds and change rainfall patterns.

The blend of atmospheric and oceanic observations from PACE is critical as ocean biology is affected by aerosols deposited onto the ocean, which in turn, produce aerosol precursors that influence atmospheric composition and climate. NASA is currently planning a second PACE instrument, a polarimeter, to better measure aerosol and cloud properties. These measurements will improve understanding of the roles of aerosols in the climate system.

Goddard’s proof-of-concept sensor for measuring ocean color – the Coastal Zone Color Scanner that flew on the Nimbus-7 satellite from 1978 to 1986 – was the first sensor to demonstrate phytoplankton biomass could be quantified from space. The Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor or SeaWiFS mission collected data from 1997 to 2010 and was the first mission dedicated to routinely observe ocean biology, chemistry, and ecology for long-term climate research.

Currently, researchers employ the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer that flies aboard both NASA’s Terra and Aqua spacecraft, and the Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite aboard the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, to measure biological and chemical properties of the ocean, as well as aerosol and cloud properties.

NASA capped the costs for PACE at $805 million, to cover the spacecraft, mission design and engineering, science, instruments, launch vehicle, data processing, and operations.

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(19 March 215) The DigitalGlobe Foundation has selected the University of California, San Diego to be one of two institutions of higher learning given open access to DigitalGlobe Basemap, an online map and database of current, high-resolution satellite imagery – of the entire planet.

For a one-year pilot study, commercial satellite imagery will be made available free of charge to selected UC San Diego faculty, students and staff who, until now, would not have been able to afford access to the planetary-scale data included in the DigitalGlobe Basemap.

“We were amazed at the amount of research going on at UC San Diego leveraging commercial satellite imagery, geospatial big data and predictive analytics,” said DigitalGlobe Foundation executive director Mark E. Brender. “The university’s Dr. Albert Lin is an early adopter of commercial satellite imagery and has hands-on experience with the use of imagery in exploration, so it was only natural that the DigitalGlobe Foundation would select his institution for the pilot program. Now the UC San Diego team will have the world at their fingertips.”

Satellite imagery has become an invaluable tool for applications such as mapping, environmental research, agriculture, national defense, energy exploration, disaster response, and human rights monitoring and enforcement. But unlike other tools, the DigitalGlobe Basemap allows researchers to process and compute on the Basemap data.

DigitalGlobe Basemap features millions of square kilometers of current and archived imagery captured by DigitalGlobe’s industry-leading constellation of earth-imaging satellites over the past 15 years, including imagery from WorldView-3, DigitalGlobe’s newest satellite that collects imagery with 30-cm ground resolution.

UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute and the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) have developed the Big Pixel Initiative to ensure that the campus makes maximum use of access to DigitalGlobe Basemap. The initiative was founded by IR/PS professor Gordon Hanson and the Qualcomm Institute’s Albert Lin and Jessica Block to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the DigitalGlobe Foundation.

With a hackathon and other activities in the works, this month the initiative will also begin awarding grants worth between $5,000 and $15,000 to faculty or students proposing the best proof-of-concept projects to demonstrate a novel use of the Basemap.

“Having access to the DigitalGlobe Basemap will allow researchers to ask questions and derive answers at a scale that is truly global,” said IR/PS and economics professor Gordon Hanson, who leads UC San Diego’s Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies, which is funding the mini-grant competition. “By combining geospatial data with state-of-the-art research in fields such as public health, economics and ecology, we should be able to glean insights that were not previously possible.”

Starting this month, proposals will be reviewed for funding on a continual basis during the 12-month course of the pilot program.

“We hope to demonstrate to DigitalGlobe Foundation the value of this campus as a partner in identifying and conducting research that utilizes imagery at scale to address questions of global importance,” added Lin, who jointly manages the Big Pixel Initiative with IR/PS’s Hanson. “This is an extremely powerful tool. For example, we can look at 100 cities of the same size and population density to figure out the factors that lead to a healthier urban engine. This would not have been within our reach without access to a comprehensive resource such as DigitalGlobe Basemap.”

DigitalGlobe Basemap is being provided by the DigitalGlobe Foundation, an academic-focused philanthropic organization supported by Colorado-based DigitalGlobe, Inc. (NYSE: DGI). The DigitalGlobe Foundation, through imagery donations from DigitalGlobe, awards grants of earth observation data and products at no cost to students and academic faculty to support qualified research and education projects.

The Big Pixel Initiative will also break new ground in geospatial data visualization, user experience interfaces, and design techniques for scientific discovery and decision-making. “The goal is to ensure that we innovate new ways of using satellite data – for example, by designing new methods for scalable satellite image ingestion, processing, and visualization,” said the Qualcomm Institute’s Lin. “New tools will improve computer vision, machine learning, geographic information systems, remote sensing, and crowd-sourcing.”

A team of geospatial scientists from the Big Pixel Initiative will also provide advisory support to faculty and students who see the value of using satellite imagery in their research, but may not yet be trained to take maximum advantage of the data coming from the DigitalGlobe Basemap. In addition to founders Albert Lin, Gordon Hanson and Jessica Block, the team includes staff researchers Deborah Forster, Marta Jankowska, and postdoctoral scholar Ran Goldblatt. The Big Pixel Initiative will also collaborate with experts in data visualization and data art, including Qualcomm Institute research scientist Lev Manovich, who also teaches at the City University of New York.

(source: UC San Diego)

(19 March 2015) ESA and the UK Space Agency have signed an arrangement that establishes access to data from the Sentinel satellites, marking a significant step in their exploitation.

Following the launch of Sentinel-1A in April 2014, the next in the series of satellites, Sentinel-2A, is scheduled for launch in June.

The Sentinel-2 mission will provide ‘colour vision’ for Europe’s Copernicus environment monitoring programme, with data being used to monitor plant health, changing lands, inland water bodies, the coastal environment and support disaster mapping.

Data from the Sentinel satellites and contributing missions to the Copernicus programme are freely accessible for Copernicus Services, as well as to scientific and other users.

ESA and the UK signed an Understanding for the Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment Cooperation yesterday evening at an event at ESA’s Headquarters in Paris.

The agreement aims to facilitate Sentinel data exploitation in the country. The UK Space Agency will coordinate ground segment activities in the UK – such as hosting, distributing, ensuring access and archiving Sentinel data – and act as an interface between ESA and national initiatives. This will be done through a ‘national mirror site’ at the Harwell Science, Innovation and Business Campus in Oxfordshire, where ESA’s space applications centre, ECSAT, is also based.

“This agreement is crucial for the user uptake of Copernicus. It is an important step in our wider commitment to extract maximum value from our space investments,” said David Parker, UK Space Agency Chief Executive signing on the UK’s behalf.

The agreement also established ESA’s role as coordinator of the Copernicus ‘space component’. The Agency will ensure direct access to Sentinel data, provide technical advice on the setting up of data acquisition and dissemination, and make data processing and archiving software available to national initiatives.

A total of seven Participating States have now signed the agreement: Greece, Norway, Italy, Finland, Germany, France and the UK.

“I welcome this agreement as it grows the network of entities that use Sentinel data even further with the addition of each new Collaborative Ground Segment,” said Volker Liebig, Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes.

(source: ESA)

(16 March 2015) A new concept that involves mounting an instrument on the International Space Station and taking advantage of signals from navigation satellites could provide measurements of sea-surface height and information about features related to ocean currents, benefiting science and ocean forecasting

We have all seen the beautiful photographs of our planet taken by astronauts, but orbiting Earth 16 times a day just 400 km above, the Space Station also offers a platform from which to measure certain variables related to climate change.

So, in 2011 ESA called for proposals to explore how the Space Station could be used to make scientifically valid observations of Earth. After reviewing and assessing numerous proposals, the result is to further develop the GEROS-ISS mission concept.

GEROS-ISS stands for GNSS reflectometry, radio occultation and scatterometry on board the ISS.

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) include GPS and Galileo satellites, which send a continual stream of microwave signals to Earth for navigation purposes, but these signals also bounce off the surface and back into space.

The idea is to install an instrument with an antenna on the Space Station that would capture signals directly from these satellites as well as signals that are reflected or scattered from Earth.

This process could be used to calculate the height of the sea surface, and to measure waves – or ‘roughness’ – that can then be used to work out the speed of surface winds.

GEROS-ISS is primarily an experiment to demonstrate new ways of observing Earth.

However, if taken beyond the testing phase this new approach would complement measurements from satellites carrying altimeters such as CryoSat and Sentinel-3, and satellites carrying wind scatterometers such as MetOp.

Importantly, it is the first concept to assess the potential of spaceborne GNSS reflectometry to determine and map ocean height at scales of 10–100 km or longer in less than four days. Current satellite altimeters, in comparison, offer global maps at scales of around 80 km, which are produced from multiple datasets every 10 days.

A system based on GEROS-ISS would, therefore, complement existing satellite systems, helping to map ocean variability at finer spatial and temporal scales over a range of seas in tropical and temperate regions.

It would also refine our understanding of how well the concept would work for measuring the roughness of the ocean surface.

In this respect, the development of GEROS-ISS benefits from experience gained with the UK’s TechDemoSat-1, which also measures ocean-surface roughness using a similar technique. It is also hoped that NASA’s upcoming CYGNSS constellation of mini satellites will help pave the way for GEROS-ISS.

In addition, GEROS-ISS uses a technique called radio occultation whereby the antenna receives signals that are refracted as they pass through the atmosphere. This can be used to generate vertical profiles of atmospheric humidity, pressure and temperature, as does the GRAS instrument on the MetOp satellites, for example.

Jens Wickert who leads the science team that proposed GEROS-ISS said, “It is very flexible, combining different mission concepts and applications in one: GNSS-reflectometry to determine sea-surface height, scatterometry to measure sea-surface roughness and radio occultation for atmospheric studies.”

ESA engineer Manuel Martin-Neira noted, “The original concept actually goes back over 20 years and has matured considerably through numerous studies and campaigns, however, it has never been duly tested from space.”

“Being able to use the International Space Station in this way means that we can quickly validate innovative observing techniques without having to build an entire satellite, and we expect this to lead to new opportunities for science,” added Michael Kern, ESA’s GEROS-ISS mission scientist.

Jason Hatton, GEROS-ISS project coordinator, said, “The concept is still going through feasibility studies, but the aim is to launch the experiment towards the end of 2019.

“It would be carried to the Space Station on a cargo vehicle and installed on ESA’s Columbus space laboratory using a robotic arm, after which GEROS-ISS would run for at least a year.”

The GEROS-ISS feasibility studies are being carried out through ESA’s General Studies Programme.

(source: ESA) adn soacenewsfeed

VANCOUVER, JULY 16, 2014 | UrtheCast Corp. (TSX:UR) (“UrtheCast” or “the Company”) today provided an update on the commissioning process for its Medium-Resolution Camera (“MRC” or “Theia”) and its Ultra HD, High-Resolution Camera (“HRC” or “Iris”). The MRC has achieved Initial Operational Capability (“IOC”), completing the MRC’s commissioning phase. Theia is now capable of commercial imaging and UrtheCast will continue to refine the operational and processing systems required to meet increased order volumes and produce value-added consumer products and services.


“Successful completion of the MRC’s commissioning phase is a significant milestone for our team. We’re extremely grateful for the hard work of the engineering teams at UrtheCast, RSC Energia, and Roscosmos. This is another testament to how well these teams continue to work together,” commented UrtheCast’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. George Tyc.

UrtheCast is continuing commissioning and calibrating the HRC. The Bi-axial Pointing Platform (“BPP”), which controls the pointing of the HRC, is experiencing difficulties in achieving the pointing control precision needed for the HRC to meet image quality specifications. Our engineering team together with RSC Energia believes it has developed a solution to this problem using existing gyroscopes on the HRC to improve the BPP pointing control. This solution has been successfully tested on the ground. The on-orbit implementation of this solution requires software updates and the installation of additional cabling inside the Zvezda module. These new cables need to be delivered to the International Space Station (ISS). As a result, there will be a several month delay in commissioning the HRC.

“We are very pleased with the solution developed by the team, and with the results of the ground tests demonstrating the expected performance. While there is never a 100% guarantee until the test results are replicated on-orbit, we are very confident this solution will enable us to capture high-resolution imagery and video with the HRC,” said UrtheCast’s CEO, Scott Larson. “Operations in space are complex and not always as predictable as many of us would like them to be. Although the technical issues affecting the commissioning of the HRC have delayed our previously disclosed commissioning schedule, we believe these issues can be resolved and we do not expect that this delay will affect the viability of our product offering.”

UrtheCast has notified its insurers regarding the potential of a claim against our in-orbit insurance policy for revenue interruption due to the commissioning delay and costs related to implementing the proposed solution.

The Company’s recent announcement regarding the opportunity to install and operate sensors on the NASA module of the ISS will result in additional development costs. UrtheCast anticipates funding these development costs over the next 3 years from a combination of non-dilutive third party funding, available cash and internal cash flow. UrtheCast is currently in an advanced stage of negotiation on a long-term contract that, if successfully concluded, would provide a substantial source of non-dilutive financing for the additional sensors.

UrtheCast will also host a conference call at 8:00 a.m. ET on July 16, 2014.

Conference Call Details

UrtheCast will also host a conference call at 8:00 a.m. ET on July 17, 2014 — the details for which will be made available that morning, prior to the call.

An archived version of the conference call will be made available on the Company’s website after the live conference call.

For further details related to UrtheCast imagery and products, our Customer Experience Team is available, Monday through Friday, 6am to 6pm PT, by calling 1-800-669-3713 or emailing CX@urthecast.com.

About UrtheCast Corp.

UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based technology company that is developing the world’s first Ultra HD video feed of Earth, streamed from space in full color. Working with renowned aerospace partners from across the globe, UrtheCast has built, launched, installed, and will soon operate two cameras on the Russian segment of the ISS. Video and still image data captured by the cameras will be downlinked to ground stations across the planet and displayed on the UrtheCast web platform, or distributed directly to exclusive partners and customers. UrtheCast’s cameras will provide Ultra HD video and still imagery of Earth that will allow for monitoring of the environment, humanitarian relief, social events, agricultural land, etc. Common shares of UrtheCast trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange as ticker ‘UR’. For more information visit our website at urthecast.com.

Forward-looking Information

This release contains certain information which, as presented, constitutes “forward-looking information” within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information involves statements that an action or event “will” be taken or occur (or similar language) and includes statements about the plans to operate camera components on the ISS, proposed image and video product offerings, expected partners and customers to distribute such products and proposed plans and timelines for commissioning of the HRC. Forward-looking statements are subject to various known and unknown risks, many of which are beyond the ability of UrtheCast to control or predict, and which may cause UrtheCast’s actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied thereby, including, but not limited to, further delays in commissioning of the HRC, damage which may have occurred to the cameras during launch or installation, unexpected changes in Russian or Canadian government policies as well as those factors discussed in the Company’s annual information form dated March 26, 2014, (the “AIF”) and the Company’s short form base shelf prospectus dated April 7, 2014 (the “Prospectus”) which are available under UrtheCast’s SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking information is developed based on assumptions about such risks, uncertainties and other factors set out herein, in the AIF and Prospectus, and as otherwise disclosed from time to time on UrtheCast’s SEDAR profile. UrtheCast undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as may be required by applicable Canadian securities laws. Readers are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements.

SOURCE UrtheCast Corp