Vancouver — UrtheCast Corp. (TSX:UR) (“UrtheCast” or the “Company”) today announces that, for the first time, newly-collected imagery from its Deimos-1 satellite is flowing to its online platform, known as the UrthePlatform, shortly after acquisition. UrtheCast anticipates that it will be able to provide this broad-area-coverage Deimos-1 data cloud-free for the entire contiguous United States, each and every month, throughout the 2016 agricultural growing season. This data will be available for extraction, on demand, from the UrthePlatform Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in GeoTIFF format at affordable price points. Deimos-1 is a clear market leader in offering such high coverage, at such scale, for application areas such as precision agriculture, forest resource management and large-scale environmental monitoring.
“This is a significant milestone for the company,” explains Wade Larson, President and Chief Executive Officer of UrtheCast. “This represents a step function in terms of our ability to serve the rapidly growing market for geoanalytics services. Now, for the first time anywhere, analytics customers will be able to access this newly-collected, cost-effective dataset at scale via APIs from a powerful cloud computing platform. This tangibly demonstrates that our UrthePlatform is operational and ready for commercial service, and it shows yet again the strategic synergies of the company’s acquisition last year of Deimos Imaging — synergies that are becoming increasingly evident to our customers.”
UrtheCast is able to offer this powerful Deimos-1 U.S. dataset — cloud-free, every month for the contiguous U.S. — in part due to Deimos-1’s wide swath of 650 km (22m GSD) and its extremely high revisit rate. The newly-flowing Deimos-1 data complements an already-existing 5-year archive of Deimos-1 data in the contiguous U.S. and forms part of a growing and powerful suite of medium-resolution sensors and global, high-quality datasets, including Theia (5m GSD) and USGS’s Landsat 8 data (30m GSD multispectral, 15m pan-sharpened), all of which are ideal for analytics.
“It’s unheard of in our industry to have access to data of this quality — in GeoTIFF format and at affordable price points,” explains Jeff Stein, VP Business Development at Orbital Insight, a leader in advanced geoanalytics and deep learning technologies. “UrtheCast is pushing the art of the possible in our industry with the speed with which they get high-value pixels from space to the cloud for computation by Orbital Insight’s A.I. algorithms.”
“Having dependable access to high quality, cloud-free imagery of the contiguous U.S. every month, and the ability to extract this data for further analysis in GeoTIFF format is enormously valuable for those working to sustainably manage and restore American forests,” states Crystal Davis, Director of Global Forest Watch, a leading organization seeking to increase the ability of governments, businesses and civil society to protect, manage, and restore forests. “UrtheCast’s technology and mission to democratize the Earth Observation industry is creating a step change for global forest monitoring and will make a real difference for our planet.”
In the coming months, UrtheCast expects to add further UrtheCast data as well as data from third-party providers to the UrthePlatform, with the objective of providing an increasingly powerful capability for geoanalytics applications and markets.
About UrtheCast Corp.
UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based technology company that serves the rapidly evolving geospatial and geoanalytics markets with a wide range of information-rich products and services. The Company currently operates four Earth Observation sensors in space, including two cameras aboard the International Space Station and two satellites, Deimos-1 and Deimos-2. Imagery and video data captured by these sensors is downlinked to ground stations across the planet and displayed on the UrthePlatform, or distributed directly to partners and customers. UrtheCast is also developing and anticipates launching the world’s first fully-integrated constellation of multispectral optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, called OptiSAR™, in addition to its proposed UrtheDaily™ constellation concept, which the Company believes will together revolutionize monitoring of our planet with high-quality, medium and high-resolution, and high-coverage and high-revisit imagery in all weather conditions, any time of day. Common shares of UrtheCast trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange as ticker ‘UR’.
