SAN FRANCISCO – Canadian hyperspectral startup Wyvern began publicly sharing Earth-observation images Feb. 3 from its high-resolution satellite sensors.
“This Open Data Program release is not only important for direct applications in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, but because hyperspectral image data from satellites has never been widely commercially available,” Wyvern co-founder Callie Lissinna told SpaceNews by email. “This is a relatively new type of data — a level of detail that is new to the satellite imagery industry — so allowing the community to innovate new use cases using free data is particularly important and exciting.”
Wyvern’s public release will allow customers to “build novel algorithms to analyze the data, leverage the data in geospatial data hackathons, and train advanced models that derive useful information from hyperspectral imagery,” Lissinna added.
Forests, Fires and Farms
The 25 images Wyvern released show forests, wildfires, crops, coastal bathymetry, open-pit mines, solar farms, and oil and gas wells around the world. Additional imagery is expected to be released this year.
“We are thrilled to launch our Open Data Program, reflecting Wyvern’s commitment to foster innovation in the remote sensing community and demonstrate the power of hyperspectral imagery to help solve some of our most urgent global challenges,” Adam O’Connor, Wyvern chief product officer, said in a statement. “We envision the Open Data Program as playing a crucial role in supporting our fellow humans in their time of greatest need by providing access to free Earth observation imagery for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions.”
Wyvern’s three Dragonette cubesats built by AAC Clyde Space provide imagery with a resolution of 5.3 meters per pixel. Dragonette-001 provides data in 23 spectral bands, while Dragonette-002 and -003 offer 31 spectral bands. A fourth Dragonette is scheduled to launch during the first half of 2025.
In addition to its own fleet, Wyvern will gather data from sensors on Loft Orbital satellites. The first Loft satellite with a Wyvern hyperspectral payload will launch no earlier than March 2025. A second will follow later in 2025, according to the news release.
Wyvern was “inspired especially by the open data philosophy of our friends at Umbra,” Lissinna said in a statement. “We believe the geospatial community will collectively benefit from data providers like Wyvern sharing imagery freely.”
Wyvern is releasing the hyperspectral datasets under a creative commons, or commercial use, license.
Debra Werner is a correspondent for SpaceNews based in San Francisco.
Debra earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. She is a recipient…
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