Data from the AxelGlobe Earth Observation constellation will become available in Taiwan starting from May 2019
Taipei (March 26, 2019) – Axelspace Corporation, a Japanese company with extensive experience in small satellite platforms development, and ODYSSEUS SPACE, a Taiwanese company developing innovative space technologies for small satellites, today announced a partnership to provide Earth Observation data in Taiwan from the new AxelGlobe constellation. AxelGlobe is the Earth observation infrastructure for a new era. It will have the ability to image the whole civilized world with a resolution of 2.5 m—enough to distinguish large cars—every day.
“This is a great opportunity for Taiwan to gain large access to such fast revisit time high-quality imagery,” said Jordan Vannitsen, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of ODYSSEUS Space. “There is a real hunger for consistent Earth Imagery data with high revisit time, and Taiwan is the perfect place to reach to startups who want to develop innovative applications for Smart Cities, Green Energy or Disaster Management. There is a huge burgeoning and enthusiastic entrepreneur community with great novel ideas here, and with this agreement, we want to help them to change how Earth Imagery is part of everybody’s life. With a partner like Axelspace, who has a reputation of high quality and high performance platforms, we are very confident that this will be reflected on the quality of the data and of the service. Developing an ecosystem in Taiwan where ODYSSEUS could have access to visual data processing expertise will be key for our own future space resources prospection activities”.
“ODYSSEUS SPACE Team has been a great help to understand the Taiwanese market and reach to key actors in the local Space Industry, but also to the startup ecosystem. Taiwanese government has been receptive so far and we want to keep working in that direction with ODYSSEUS,” said Yasunori Yamazaki, Chief Business Development Officer for Axelspace. “We are of course interested in providing our data to Government Agencies, but we are far more interested in helping companies to grow. We are a small company ourselves and we love to work with the private sector, because it is bringing the change and the disruption. Because of its size and high-tech environment, Taiwan will become the perfect laboratory to try new ideas and business models. We have already met a lot of potential users who expressed their strong interest in our data and who are looking forward to using and implementing them in their models.”
Axelspace has begun the development of AxelGlobe, an Earth observation service based on a multiple-satellite single plane constellation. With it, they will be able to obtain imagery of more than half of the planet’s dry land once every single day, with consistent imagery at 2.5m resolution. As a first step to construct the constellation, the company launched the first satellite named GRUS on December 27 last year. The first light from the satellite was successfully shared and the commercial service is to begin in May 2019. After that, Axelspace expects to launch 3 more GRUS satellites in 2020 and to complete the entire constellation by 2022.
ODYSSEUS SPACE was created in April 2016 in Taiwan by international space experts with complementary backgrounds from space agencies, space industry and space research laboratories. ODYSSEUS SPACE is playing a major role in enhancing and facilitating international cooperation between Asia and the rest of the world in order to bring together innovative concepts and technologies and to push back the boundaries of what is currently feasible with small satellites missions.
ABOUT ODYSSEUS SPACE, INC.
ODYSSEUS is a young startup created by French Professionals coming from the European Space sector and implemented in Taiwan since 2016. ODYSSEUS is using its experience and expertise both in Asia and in Europe to address the booming global market of small satellites applications.
ODYSSEUS long-term goal is to develop innovative technologies to unlock space resources prospection missions for a fraction of the current cost, and to move toward a sustainable environment where most of the resources would be available and used in-situ. This is why ODYSSEUS is investing in technologies such as automated visual data processing, optical communication systems, compact and efficient propulsion systems as well as autonomous navigation for satellites to support the global NewSpace effort. The company, who won the 2018 Space Resources.lu Challenge of the ESA Space Exploration Masters competition from the Luxembourg Space Agency, has started the process of relocating their headquarters from Taiwan to Luxembourg but will keep developing its activities in Taiwan and the rest of Asia.
Visit ODYSSEUS Space, Inc. online at https://www.odysseus.space.