%page_title%

The Eagle Eye satellite, weighing approximately 55 kg and designed and built entirely in Poland, was launched into orbit. The satellite was carried aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as part of the Transporter-11 mission. The instrument was developed by a consortium including Creotech Instruments, Scanway and the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences (CBK PAN). Eagle Eye is an Earth observation satellite capable of providing images with a resolution of about 1 metre from a very low orbit at an altitude of about 350 km.

This mission also featured another Polish technology. The Φ-sat-2 satellite, built by the European Space Agency (ESA), was launched into orbit with a significant contribution from Polish company KP Labs, which developed data processing algorithms for the satellite.

For the Φ-sat-2 mission, KP Labs developed a cloud detection application, which is crucial for one of the satellite’s main tasks – processing satellite imagery for emergency response, such as floods or earthquakes. The artificial intelligence (AI) on board Φ-sat-2 enables autonomous detection and classification of marine vessels, which is useful for monitoring activities such as illegal fishing. In addition, AI supports deep image compression, which increases the efficiency of data transmission, and helps detect marine pollution and monitor land fires.

Measuring just 22 x 10 x 33 cm, Φ-sat-2 is equipped with a multispectral instrument that images the Earth in seven different bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from visible light to near-infrared. The innovation of this instrument lies in the implementation of AI algorithms that analyse and process the data directly on board, optimising the process by sending only useful information back to Earth.

The application developed by Polish engineers preliminarily processes satellite images by identifying and removing cloud-covered areas, allowing only precise and valuable data to be transmitted for further analysis. This solution optimizes the use of satellite resources and improves the quality of the collected information, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of the subsequent AI applications on board, leading to more reliable and timely analyses.

The Gliwice-based company KP Labs is already testing its solutions in orbital flights. On November 11, 2023, the Intuition-1 satellite, equipped with the Leopard Data Processing Unit (DPU) designed by KP Labs, was placed into orbit. The Leopard DPU uses machine learning and AI algorithms to autonomously process data in space, performing up to three trillion operations per second, significantly speeding up data analysis processes.

The Φ-sat-2 mission was developed by ESA in collaboration with Open Cosmos as the main contractor. The industrial consortium also includes companies such as Ubotica, CGI, CEiiA, GEO-K, KP Labs, and SIMERA.