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T-4 Months to Launch
Winston Tri
November 01, 2024
Table of Contents
See Clarity Day — Presenting the Precision Platform
It’s been a busy month for Albedo — and it just so happened to culminate on one very recent, special day.
On October 21st, the Albedo team debuted our integrated VLEO spacecraft, the Precision Platform. To commemorate the accomplishment, we brought together a small group of customers, policymakers, investors, and supporters at our Denver HQ for See Clarity Day. Attendees were treated to a comprehensive tour of how Albedo will capture 10-centimeter resolution imagery as well as keynote speeches from Senator John Hickenlooper (CO) and former NASA administrator Dan Goldin.
Experience the VLEO Mission
Mission-first
We kicked off the tour with an overview of what it means to fly in VLEO and an accompanying simulation of Clarity-1’s day-in-the-life. Before it was a popular TikTok trend, engineers have relied on this standard simulation to walk through the satellite’s CONOPS (short for “concept of operations”) — basically what the satellite is doing and in what order. Kevin, our brain on mission design, can be seen educating the masses on what differentiates VLEO from your regular LEO CONOPs. To put it simply: everything happens in the blink of an eye and you need to thrust — a lot.
Order Up!
Clare also spends a good part of her orbits imaging and collecting orders for customers. AyJay spent a few moments catching Senator Hickenlooper up to speed on the current state of ordering satellite imagery — and how that surprisingly (and sadly) still involves phone calls, emails, and sometimes fax machines in 2024. That primer was a fantastic setup for Lauryn’s demo of how easy it is to task Clarity-1 via Albedo’s API, which is currently being powered by the same realistic simulation Kevin showed above. Teamwork, baby. 🤝
Once we’ve received an order from the customer, we still to need to schedule and communicate that order back to the satellite, similar to how a chef tells their kitchen to fire two penne alla vodka. Excuse the obvious hunger as I’m writing this, but it is an apt analogy — our scheduling and overall ground software system (chef) need to determine what actions to take and communicate that to the satellite (line cooks). Above, we see Heather and Fitz demoing a live command to the satellite and how it propagates into radio frequency via the ground station antenna simulator (big black box).
These go to eleven
Not only does VLEO constantly try to pull us down into a final, fiery embrace with the atmosphere, but it also continually perturbs us as we’re orbiting. Ripping through the atmosphere at a casual 16,000 mph, we run into a fair amount of stuff on the road — not dissimilar to the bugs that splatter across your windshield on a roadtrip. Except for this roadtrip is in the vacuum of space, and momentum from those bugs can actually throw you off course. Thankfully, we have Jacob. And Jacob has been leading the charge on our momentum management solution (see his gesture above) which takes the momentum from these atmospheric particles and redistributes them to our advantage. Not pictured are about 16 guitar amps on the floor, which do a surprisingly capable job of simulating torque during testing.
For us, by us
While we don’t have imagery we can dogfood (test out ourselves) quite yet, a lot of Albedo certainly plans to do so. During his tour stop, Nate walked us through the process of capturing imagery, starting with a live operation of our line scanning sensor and ending with our X-band radio transmitting the actual imagery. Cool, here’s the other thing: Nate is also a farmer when he’s not slinging software at Albedo. During this past growing season, he noticed a couple of his fruit trees were dying because of poor irrigation. He explained that if he had the imagery that the process he’d just demoed produced, he would have been able to use both our visible and thermal imagery to save those trees. Just hold on a little longer, Nate! 🤞
The Precision Platform
To conclude the tour with a bang, we gave attendees a sneak-peak of our VLEO spacecraft, a.k.a. the Precision Platform in all its glory. Not only did they get a close-up look at the fully-connected internal hardware but also were treated to a live demo of our precision actuators running through an imaging scan profile. The Gestalt of the Precision Platform was on full display as we walked through how our stable structural design works in tandem with specialized hardware and optimization algorithms, all to enable high-quality, 10cm imagery. As guests saw at this station and the earlier mission simulation station, all these aspects come together to enable Clarity-1 to spin, slew, and scan with exacting precision through VLEO with generational-level body control — like the LeBron James of space, if you will.
Actual pictures to come soon — I promise 😉
Keynotes
Before his keynote, Senator Hickenlooper did his part in the Albedo mission by constructing and signing a section of Clarity-1’s solar array. In his keynote, the Senator emphasized the “direct bearing” that Albedo’s 10-centimeter imagery has on the National Security mission. He also highlighted the importance of VLEO for that specific reason, just as we’ve seen from previous submissions to the House. Check out an excerpt from his keynote here:
Dan Goldin emphasized the need for continued American innovation, particularly in the face of competing powers like China. He said, “This is a really big deal, and you've done a really good thing, the whole team here. I don't think people understand the importance of VLEO, and its potential, because cost, performance, and safety are all involved.” A serious and important conversation — done right before a playful Q&A between him and Topher.
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See y’all next month! Leaving you with this beautiful photo of some of the crew after a successful See Clarity Day:
If smiles could build and launch a satellite, we’d still be world-class 😎
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