Boston-based weather intelligence company Tomorrow.io has signed strategic partnerships with Astro Digital and Muon Space for the development of its proprietary radar-equipped weather satellites.
Tomorrow.io plans to launch a constellation of approximately 30 small satellites to provide high-resolution global coverage of 3D precipitation and other key parameters with hourly updates compared with the two- or three-day revisit rate of existing missions.
Astro Digital’s Corvus-XL satellite platform has been selected for the constellation’s first two satellites, planned for launch in late 2022. These satellites are initial demonstration satellites for the operational constellation. Astro Digital will integrate Tomorrow.io’s radar payload onto the spacecraft, conduct pre-launch testing, deliver the satellites to the launch site, and integrate them onto the launch vehicle.
John Springmann, vice president of space at Tomorrow.io, said, “The modular design and flexibility of Astro Digital’s Corvus-XL satellite platform is well suited to our payload and mission, and its proven heritage minimizes technical and schedule risk. We see Astro Digital as not just a satellite bus provider but a true mission partner.”
Astro Digital has delivered over a dozen satellites to date with more than a decade of cumulative time on orbit.
Chris Biddy, CEO and co-founder of Astro Digital, added, “Tomorrow.io’s weather constellation is one of the most advanced and exciting new commercial constellations in the market. We are thrilled to support Tomorrow.io’s mission with our flight-proven small satellites and related services.”
Tomorrow.io has also partnered with Muon Space to support the development of its operational constellation architecture. “Muon Space’s robust expertise in developing space systems will form a solid foundation for achieving the groundbreaking goals of Tomorrow.io’s weather radar constellation, including becoming the world’s most capable precipitation monitoring system,” said Springmann.
The Muon Space team has led more than 30 successful civil, defense and commercial space missions, including large commercial constellations. Jonny Dyer, CEO at Muon Space, commented, “We are extremely excited to partner with Tomorrow.io on this ambitious and important mission. As we look to the future, global scientific measurements of Earth’s systems are going to be more critical than ever, and we are delighted to have a partner in Tomorrow.io that shares our passion for this.”
Tomorrow.io will feed the data directly into its in-house modeling suite that powers its Weather Intelligence Platform, used by businesses and organizations to react to increasingly extreme weather and climate conditions. Additionally, Tomorrow.io will support a selected group of government agencies to improve operational weather forecasts worldwide.
Rei Goffer, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Tomorrow.io, explained, “Space now enables us to close observational gaps that have existed since the dawn of modern weather forecasting, and impacted the lives of billions. We have come up with a way to solve perhaps the biggest of these gaps, and offer a much closer and more frequent look into the water cycle that drives our weather and climate systems. Our constellation will support the goal of improving weather intelligence and climate security everywhere, because all local forecasts depend on high-quality global data.”
