HEO Inspect

Thanks for hunting @mwseibel ! Hi Product Hunt, my cofounder @hiranyajaya and I are super pleased to unveil HEO Inspect. TL;DR The number of satellites is increasing 40x over the next decade and the level of satellite failures in-orbit is high (30-40% fail before the end of their designed life), leading to lost revenue and creating debris. HEO Inspect allows satellite operators to monitor their satellites visually and inspect external faults. The inspection images are taken from 25 (and counting!) cameras on Earth observation satellites that photograph customer satellites as they fly past. See the images above for a real example of the International Space Station, taken earlier this year. Longer read Our story: HEO Inspect was developed based on my PhD research on how to inspect and prospect asteroids and now is adapted to inspect space objects in low Earth orbit. Hiranya (who has a PhD in robotics) and I started working on this problem after some current customers saw our asteroid work and convinced us to redirect efforts to other objects in orbit. The technique developed is called “flyby inspection” and we now use it to massively increase the number of space objects we can image. HEO Inspect rents time on 25 spacecraft (more to add soon) with cameras that are already in orbit and the product is already helping customers today. The problem: Space is hard, with 30-40% of satellites failing before the end of their design life over the last decade. Many of the failures could have been prevented or more rapidly diagnosed with inspection, which is exactly how these problems are solved on Earth today. We’re encouraging satellite operators not to wait until after something has already gone wrong, but to use inspection as one of the tools they use to monitor satellite health. Our solution: You provide the satellite you want to monitor, we verify that the satellite is yours and then we start imaging it at regular intervals. We provide a monthly report, with data that our analytics tools have picked up from the images. If something isn’t right, we’ll notify you immediately. If your satellite is not yet identified, we’ll work with you to image objects that could be yours and identify which belongs to you. (For those non-space folk out there, this is a real problem!) There is a government version of the product that allows regulators to monitor a wider number of space objects, including debris and numerous satellites. Who is this for? Satellite operators Satellite and subsystem builders Government and defence We currently service orbits between 100km and 700km altitude, and will continue to expand coverage to other orbits.

Not that many of us own a satellite that could make use of HEO Inspect but as someone who has looked into this product and talked to people in the space industry I can tell you it works, it meets a demand, and so far no one else does this. The immediate use case of low earth orbit sat inspection is followed by doing this for geostationary orbit (billion dollar satellites, further away and much harder to do) and eventually inspecting near earth asteroids of which there are about 1 million and about 100k of those are interesting from a minerals and resource perspective. Eventually, HEO can match those asteroids in orbit with meteoroid samples on earth and can this way match them with one another (over billions of years, asteroids have collided, sending debris pieces to earth, creating impact craters such as the one that extinct the dinosaurs). That’s probably the closest we’ll come to unlocking the secrets to the universe in a long time!!! Please upvote

Congrats on the launch, guys!

Awesome idea & product! Congrats on the launch!

This is super cool!

Congrats on the launch @william_crowe and @hiranyajaya

Congrats William and Hiranya! What an exciting product! 👏👏