• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar
  • NEWS:
  • SatNews
  • SatMagazine
  • MilSatMagazine
  • SmallSat News
  • |     EVENTS:
  • SmallSat Symposium
  • Satellite Innovation
  • MilSat Symposium

SatNews

  • HOME
  • Magazines
  • Events
  • Perspectives
  • Industry Calendar
    • IN PERSON
    • VIRTUAL
  • Subscribe

A Move To Australia For Lux Aerobot + Their Atmospheric Satellites

December 10, 2020

Lux Aerobot is set to permanently settle in Adelaide, Australia, as the company gains new projects in the defence and mining sectors

Lux Co-Founder and President, Katrina Albert, said that while the company will maintain an office in Canada, Australia will be the testbed of overall company strategy.

Lux Aerobot captured a range of images from 23 km above Earth during a trial of one of its atmospheric satellites 50 km east of Adelaide in 2019.

“It’s the first place where we’re actually deploying the technology [and] where we’re showcasing the different use-cases that the technology can be helpful towards,” Albert said.

Lux Aerobot specializes in the design, manufacturing and operation of atmospheric satellites for Earth Observation (EO), and has been testing its atmospheric balloons in South Australia since 2019. The company is currently working on bushfire and coastline monitoring projects for the Australian Department of Defence.

The bushfire monitoring project is a collaboration between Lux and RMIT University and aims to give real-time information on the location of current bushfires and predictions on where they will spread so firefighting resources can be allocated more effectively.

“It’s really difficult to scope down the number of applications that the technology could be helpful for… just imagine a sort of Google Earth, live and very high-resolution,” Albert said. “It can support a lot of different industries, but we understood kind of quickly that bushfire was a very urgent application that needed support from new capabilities and new industry players.”

Two balloon launches have been completed to demonstrate the bushfire monitoring technology, and a final launch will occur next year over a planned burn.

The coastline monitoring project is focused on tracking illegal activities on Australian coastlines and will conclude with a final demonstration in late-2021.

“We’ll be demonstrating the object-identification portion, the real-time analysis, the on-board computing necessary to do that analysis and to have the information as fast as possible to the stakeholder,” Albert said.

The project is a collaboration with the University of South Australia’s Institute for Telecommunications Research and the Australian Institute for Machine Learning at the University of Adelaide.

Lux has also expanded its collaboration with the Australian mining industry.

Albert said although COVID-19 made kicking off new projects difficult, Lux followed up a 2019 agreement with Oz Minerals with a new collaboration with Rio Tinto this year and that company has provided Lux funding for technology development for the next three years.

“The vision of the company is to be able to have multiple units over a region and be able to give real-time insights for different industries,” Albert said. “In mining, you’ll be able to do some monitoring of your operation, and then adjust your production while for agriculture you’ll be able to have some sort of real-time yield production estimates.”

Albert said the company’s two core specialties are space engineering and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML).

“The balloons have a control system that allows them to stay over a point of interest, but they’re also able to move from Point A to Point B if required, so either we can tell the balloon to stay over an area, or we can ask it to scan an area,” Albert said. “We then take the images that [are acquired] in-flight and analyze them in order to give the information required for decision-making.”

Lux’s technology will learn what to look for and draw attention to it with less manual human monitoring. Albert said Lux came to South Australia in 2019 after she and co-founder Vincent Lachance realized their technology was better suited to regions closer to the equator due to the way it operated at the time. South Australia was the most interesting export market for the company due to the large presence of defence, mining and agriculture industries.

Photo — Left: Vincent Lachance, company CEO and Co-Founder and, right, Katrina Albert, President and Co-Founder.

Article is courtesy of The Lead and author Sezen Bakan

Filed Under: Atmospheric balloons, Earth Observation (EO)

Primary Sidebar

Most Read Stories

  • SpaceX Starlink push successful
  • UPDATE 3: Rocket Lab pushes NASA's TROPICS mission to orbit... Rocket Lab's official launch report...
  • UPDATE 3: Bye-bye BADR-8 as SpaceX launches the Arabsat satellite to orbit
  • In Their Honor ... Lest We Forget
  • It was a Heavy experience — ViaSat-3 climbs to orbit via SpaceX

About Satnews

  • Contacts
  • History

Archives

  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020

Secondary Sidebar

x
Sign up Now (For Free)
Access daily or weekly satellite news updates covering all aspects of the commercial and military satellite industry.
Invalid email address
Notify Me Regarding ( At least one ):
We value your privacy and will not sell or share your email or other information with any other company. You may also unsubscribe at anytime.

Click Here to see our full privacy policy.
Thanks for subscribing!