Hydrosat

Hydrosat is a Washington DC-based Earth observation company founded in 2017 developing a thermal infrared (TIR) satellite constellation to provide high-resolution, high-revisit temperature measurements of Earth's surface for agriculture, water management, wildfire prediction, and climate monitoring. Thermal infrared remote sensing measures the land surface temperature (LST) emitted from soil, vegetation, and water bodies — not reflected sunlight — providing information that passive optical sensors fundamentally cannot capture: crop water stress, soil moisture deficits, urban heat island intensity, and pre-ignition wildfire risk from drought-desiccated vegetation.

Hydrosat's scientific foundation is evapotranspiration (ET) estimation — calculating how much water crops are losing to evaporation and transpiration using the energy balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal emissions. High-resolution ET maps at field level (30 m or better) allow farmers and irrigation managers to detect crop stress days before visible symptoms appear and optimize irrigation timing and volume. For a major irrigated agriculture region, precision ET data can reduce water use by 15–25% while maintaining yields — a significant value proposition in water-stressed regions like California, the Colorado River basin, and the Middle East.

For wildfire prediction, dry vegetation has elevated surface temperatures relative to healthy vegetation under the same solar conditions — a thermal anomaly detectable days before ignition. Hydrosat's constellation targets revisit rates sufficient to track fuel moisture proxy through LST time series, potentially improving fire risk mapping beyond current VIIRS/MODIS capabilities.

Hydrosat won a Muon Space contract for a Constellation-as-a-Service spacecraft integrating multispectral and thermal IR instruments, demonstrating the hosted payload model for constellation build-out. The company is developing its own dedicated TIR satellite platform in parallel, targeting resolutions of 30–60 m GSD at revisits of 1–3 days. Hydrosat competes with Pixxel (hyperspectral), Planet (optical with limited thermal), and the NASA/USGS Landsat-9 (30 m thermal band) for agricultural and environmental monitoring customers.