Albedo, one of the leaders in building Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) satellites for ultra-high resolution imaging, announced that it has been awarded a 2.5-year contract, with additional flexibility to extend it further, from the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office (CSPO) as part of the Strategic Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Framework, specifically the Commercial Electro-Optical Capabilities (CEC) Focus Area.

Albedo will collaborate closely with NRO to provide both near and long-term EO remote sensing capabilities via modeling, simulation, and data evaluation. This effort will conduct accuracy and quality assessments such as the National Imagery Interpretability Rating Scale (NIIRS), which measures the clarity of images from satellites. Albedo plans to provide industry-leading, native 10 cm per pixel visible imagery, improving the current best commercial rating of NIIRS 5.6 to NIIRS 7.0, and unlock new intelligence use cases for the unclassified domain. Furthermore, Albedo also plans to provide Nighttime Imaging (NTI), Non-Earth Imaging (NEI), and video using its thermal LWIR sensor commercial capabilities.

“We are thrilled to work with NRO and help support their efforts to secure and expand America’s advantage in space,” stated Albedo's CEO Topher Haddad. "Our agile VLEO constellation will provide high-NIIRS revisit rates, point target volumes not currently available commercially, and enable solutions that are easily sharable across the defense/intelligence community and with our allies."

The effort will also demonstrate end-to-end tasking, collection, and product delivery services, including delivery of EO data to government-specified ground stations from on-orbit satellites. Albedo also plans to fulfill ad-hoc product ordering and delivery requests from the NRO and their partners. “Our satellites are designed to be highly taskable and are well suited for ad-hoc tasking requests. Our future rapid revisit, on-demand tasking, and tailored collection areas will support many intelligence applications,” added Haddad.

Albedo is the only commercial satellite that plans to co-collect LWIR, which can be overlaid with the visible image to generate a novel product called Vis-Sharp Thermal. The resulting product reveals both contextual data and time-based activity within the image, supporting activity detection, indications and warnings, and target discrimination that cannot be obtained from a single source of data alone.

Click here to learn more about Albedo's space capabilities.