Orbital Sidekick

Orbital Sidekick (OSK) leverages advanced hyperspectral imaging technology to provide monitoring and analysis services. 

Its key product is SIGMA or Spectral Intelligence Global Monitoring Application platform, which collates information transmitted by its Global Hyperspectral Observation Satellite (GHOSt) constellation, which captures hyperspectral data. This data is analyzed and compared with historical datasets to identify environmental activity and chemical changes. 

OSK's GHOSt constellation delivers detailed spectral data from 400 to 2,500 nanometers across 468 bands with 8-meter resolution and can capture over 500 bands of light with 20x greater sensitivity compared to traditional monitoring systems. Hyperspectral imaging allows companies to "see" the chemical signatures of various substances, such as gas, by collecting and analyzing hundreds of wavelength bands. This technology is especially useful for pipelines, as it can detect leaks even when the pipelines are buried underground, which is true for the vast majority of them. This technology is therefore useful for applications in energy sector monitoring, such as identifying methane leaks and other hydrocarbon emissions from pipelines and wellheads. OSK has launched multiple GHOSt satellites, with plans to expand the constellation to 14–20 satellites for weekly global coverage​.

Orbital Sidekick launched its first satellite in 2021 and has six satellites in its GHOSt constellation as at June 2024; the company had aims to expand its constellation to a minimum of 14 satellites.

Key customers and partnerships

Notable clients include US Air Force, US Space Force, National Reconnaissance Office, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, and iPIPE.

OSK partners with NVIDIA to use its NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform to process and analyze the data collected by OSK’s constellation of satellites in real time (January 2023) and with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for compute and analytics services to power its data pipeline and imagery storage solution (April 2023). It also collaborated with SpaceX to launch its satellites into orbit (April 2023), and its satellites were manufactured by Astro Digital (Feb 2021).