San Francisco startup Orbital Sidekick (OSK) is deploying satellite technology to monitor gas leaks on Earth through hyperspectral intelligence. The process can also help detect signals of where lithium needed to produce EV batteries is located.
“Space-based hyperspectral intelligence basically breaks up the spectrum of light to see what’s happening at a chemical level without needing an aircraft,” Kaushik Bangalore, vice president of payload engineering at OSK, said in an Nvidia blog.
“Previous industry-standard ways of detecting [leaks] were unreliable as they used small aircraft and pilots looking out of the window for leaks, depending on the trained eye rather than sensors or other technologies,” he added.
OSK operates satellites to collect images, which are processed and analyzed via the Nvidia Jetson edge AI platform, according to Nvidia. The intelligence gathered includes the type of leak detected and its GPS location, its size and its urgency can be viewed on a display by users of OSK’s Sigma monitor program.
The company, founded in 2016, has monitored 20,000 kilometers of pipelines for different customers, detecting nearly 100 suspected methane leaks, 200 suspected liquid hydrocarbon leaks or contamination problems and more than 300 intrusion problems with digging or construction. The US Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration tallied 6,000 pipeline-related problems over 19 years through 2021 resulting in $11 billion in damages.
Bangalore said the work done from OSK’s GHOSt satellites generates huge amount of data from various sensors , partly because hyperspectral imagery can be 400 times the size of 2D visual data. That’s where the Jetson AGX Xavier module helps as an AI engine at the edge of each satellite. Bangalore calculated that module and Nvidia CV-Cuda and CUDA Python software toolkits have quickened OSK analyst five times. Once an analysis is done, the system sends the data back to Earth.
Processing of data can be done with a single orbit, with 15 sun-synchronous orbits each day. OSK chose Jetson because it works with off-the-shelf products for use in industrial applications that provid chock, vibration and temperature tolerance.
OSK is a member of Nvidia Inception, a free program for startups, where it received technical support.
Its satellites are deployed with the US Department of Defense and energy sector. Nvidia said Energy Transfer, a pipeline operator is planning to use OSK’s GHOSt constellation of satellites.
There’s even an EV angle to what OSK offers, including the ability to find signals of lithium, cobalt and other elements by showing a hyperspectral index of geographic areas that emit the signals as compared to background soil.