Spire awarded contract for Earth observation data

Spire Global, Inc. (“Spire” or “the Company”) has announced the continuation of its participation in NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program with a six-million-dollar contract extension. The contract continuation, Task Order 6 (TO6), is a subscription data solution that includes radio occultation (RO) data, grazing angle GNSS-RO, total electron content (TEC) data, precise orbit determination (POD) data, soil moisture and ocean surface wind speed GNSS-Reflectometry data, and magnetometer data. This data will be available to all federal agencies, NASA-funded researchers and, more broadly, to all the US Government-funded researchers for scientific purposes.

Under CSDA Program TO6, Spire will deliver a comprehensive catalog of data, associated metadata, and ancillary information from its Earth-orbiting small-satellite constellation. The Company operates its constellation in low Earth and collects upwards of 10,000 radio occultations per day with consistent global coverage. For TO6, Spire will provide rolling access to 12 months of radio occultation data with a 30-day latency. This data will be archived and maintained by NASA under the CSDA Program’s SmallSat Data Explorer (SDX) database.

The program includes end-user license agreements (EULAs) to enable broad levels of dissemination. All federal agencies and the US Government-funded researchers will have access to Spire’s data for scientific purposes under TO6 and will be able to request access to the data via the CSDA Program’s Commercial Datasets webpage.

NASA has used Spire data in its research regarding water and sea ice levels in the polar regions, the height of the Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL), and the day-to-day variability of thermospheric density at flight level. NASA also noted that Spire data has shown positive benefit to its GEOS Atmospheric Data Assimilation System, which uses space-based data to analyze the Earth’s atmosphere and assimilate the data into its Earth observation systems. As one of the original vendors for the CSDA Program, Spire provides NASA yearly updates to the scope of work under this agreement to ensure alignment of data to the agency’s needs.

Spire.com