Albedo friends, customers, and everything in between — it’s been an absolutely incredible two months. For reasons unbeknownst to me, folks have been assuming that now that we’ve launched Clarity-1 into space that we’re somehow less busy? You wish. Can’t stop won’t stop.

Clarity-1 is En Route to VLEO 🔥 

Big news: Clare’s thrusters are firing and she has begun her descent down to VLEO.

Recapping back to the smooth drop-off in LEO, Clare progressed quickly through the early steps of commissioning and validated our CMG steering law, flight & ground software, custom electronics, and thermal management system — all in the first two weeks. A TRL-9 maiden spacecraft in 14 days? Not bad.

Since then, we’ve capitalized on the forgiving environment of LEO to push four(!) SpaceDrop aka on-orbit updates to optimize Clarity-1’s performance and lifetime. We only had one legitimate anomaly during LEO commissioning, and our incredible GNC engineers went heads down into algorithm-land and fixed it with SpaceDrop v4.

We’ve now successfully commissioned our thrusters and have begun our descent into VLEO. Our journey has two very important destinations — much like Frodo Baggins’ journey in The Lord of The Rings series. Seem like a reach? Maybe. Is the only similarity a long journey involving two significant locations? Probably. Does it bring me great pleasure to and connect two seemingly disparate ideas? Yes! So humor me.

And before I begin my explanation, it’s important to set some context. Clarity-1 has a significantly large telescope; it’s how we’ll collect such exquisite and resolute imagery. The thing with optics and glass is that they’re easily contaminated or damaged. Case in point? I bet the phone screen you’re reading this newsletter on has a scratch, some sediment, or at least a smudge from the natural oil on your fingers. Now magnify the consequences of the smudge times a gajillion (scientific term) because you’re launching a very large telescope into space that you can never touch or clean again. We didn’t take any chances in building and launching Clarity-1 — from our ISO 7 cleanroom, robust vibrational environmental testing, to including a contamination cover on our payload. Functionally similar to a lens cap on a camera, our payload cover helps prevent any contamination from hitting our high-performance optics. In the same way that you need to remove the lens cap before taking a picture, we also need to remove our cover before we can start capturing actual imagery. And we’ll do this in the most Albedo way possible — we will completely jettison or eject the payload cover once Clarity is deep in VLEO.

However, to avoid completely starving ourselves of photons until VLEO, we built a cover with windows. With these photons we’ve been able to prove out our sensor and general payload functionality. Photons → electrons → DN counts is looking really good. Noise is better than expected. Dynamic range is rolling deep. Platform stability is tight. All indications that these first pictures in VLEO are going to be very pretty.

Now back to the main story: Clarity will first thrust down to ~350 km from our current 510 km altitude. As LEO becomes increasingly congested with more satellites, space safety is more relevant a concern than ever, and 350 km is a very safe place to jettison our payload cover. While some might argue that this “huge lens cap” is comparable to a cubesat with no propulsion… as the company commercializing VLEO, we have space sustainability in our DNA. One might think atmospheric drag is our arch-nemesis, but with our bus Precision built for peak solar-cycle in VLEO, the atmosphere turns out to be a nice natural debris remover. In other words, VLEO is a permanently safe regime from growing congestion risks in LEO.

Descending to 350 km will take up to a few months; there is a fine balancing act of thrusting, maintaining spacecraft health, avoiding conjunction risk, and optimizing our on-board fuel that requires finesse and time. But completing the first leg of our journey will allow us to capture and share our First Light imagery as early as possible and begin the process of calibrating our imagery in preparation for commercial operations.

The second destination brings us to our notional operational altitude of 320 km — deeper into VLEO territory where things get spicy. The Clarity constellation is designed for a 274 km circular orbit, but we plan to operate Clarity-1 at 320 km to produce a better holistic capability while Clarity-1 is operating solo. We may make a game-time decision to go lower. We’ll keep you posted.

Thrusting to decrease our altitude is not the only orbital maneuver we’ll perform. We'll fine-tune our orbit inclination and Local Time of Ascending Node (LTAN) — optimizing for when and where we pass over our imaging targets. In parallel we’ll be systematically collecting atmospheric data, atomic oxygen levels, and other environmental parameters that will inform future VLEO missions for our AFRL STRATFI customers.

This methodical approach means every thruster burn and calibration image simultaneously validates our commercial mission while proving the foundational tech for our constellation. By the time Clarity-1 settles into operational altitude, she won't just be ready to deliver game-changing imagery — she'll have proven that American engineering can absolutely dominate the unforgiving frontier of VLEO.

Much like Frodo Baggins had to first travel to Rivendell before completing his journey to Mount Doom, Clare must first travel to 350 km to do a few important things before settling into her operational orbit. Also similar to the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Box Set, it will take a while to finish, but I can promise it’s well worth it 😊.

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Until next time,
Winston & Team Albedo