By Keith Button|January 2025
Scientists, first responders and environmental watchdogs are smart, but not smart enough to always predict where a volcano will erupt, a wildfire will break out, an algae bloom explode or a ship will illegally flush its bilge. By the time any of them put in a request to a satellite operator and receive images of the scene, hours to days have passed.
“Not only have you provided something that’s of no use to the end client, you’ve also wasted the valuable compute and power budget of the satellite,” says Fintan Buckley, CEO of Dublin-based Ubotica, a satellite software developer that’s among those aspiring to arm satellites with artificial intelligence to solve this problem.
Under a $632,000 contract with the…