Persistent EO from VLEO
AFWERX · AFWERX TACFI · AFWERX
Award
Description
Earth Observant Inc.’s (EOI Space’s) Direct to Phase II TACFI effort will further the development of their Low Flying Bus (LFB) by incorporating the DoD’s desire for near real-time transmission of satellite optical imagery directly to the warfighter. EOI Space will analyze the entire imagery chain to ensure the best possible outcome for the warfighter. The payload, edge compute system, and radio will all be designed and prototyped with special emphasis on understanding and documenting the entire image signal chain and data stream. Specifically, this work focuses on maturing and validating the payload compute component of the optical payload. During this study we will focus development on four components: 1) edge compute hardware 2) imagery processing software that will run on the edge compute system 3) the analytics processing software that will run on the edge compute system and 4) the capability of these combined systems will be validated via a “satellite downlink demonstration” in which we will transmit simulated and/or surrogate data that has been processed in the demonstration payload over a Ka band or similar link to a mobile device.