Spire Provides Satellite Service for NASA Mission to Capture Soil Moisture Data

Spire Global has secured a contract extension from NASA and supported an agency technology demonstration effort to acquire soil moisture data from space for use in agricultural production forecasting and flood prediction.

The company said Tuesday it specifically collected ultra high frequency and P-band data needed to inform the SigNals Opportunity: P-band Investigation mission.

A Purdue University and NASA team initiated the SNOOPI mission and used Spire’s UHF and P-band data to validate a remote-sensing technique called signals of opportunity to observe the earth’s soil moisture.

According to Kamal Arafeh, senior vice president of global sales at Spire, “[The mission] is the first demonstration of measuring root-zone soil moisture from space using signals of opportunity that are important for detecting early drought warnings as well as crop-yield forecasts.”

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Piepmeier, chief microwave instrument engineer at NASA, remarked that Spire’s efforts helped lessen mission risks.

The contractor’s participation is under NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisiton Program.