5 ways Spire solves US government mission challenges

At Spire, we work with a range of customers to develop and deliver problem-solving data sets. Our customers use our data to develop business strategies, optimize logistics, and streamline operations. Spire works with more than just aviation, weather, and maritime customers. We frequently customize data sets to help government and federal agencies oversee vessels, monitor global environmental factors including denied areas, and track illicit activities, like illegal fishing and drug trafficking. Spire Federal provides mission-critical situational awareness while reducing the total cost of ownership for our customers.

Providing Enhanced Visibility in Data Deserts

Our AIS-based maritime solutions increase global maritime domain awareness, enable coastline policing, and provide greater visibility of the poles. Our cloud-based data distribution service combines satellite and terrestrial streaming data and helps our customers model the probability of a satellite AIS collection over a wide variety of geographic locations around the globe. The tool uses input from the constellation geometry, individual satellite performance, the tasking and operations schedules, vessel and AIS transmission densities for geographic regions and time, and AIS transceiver power classes. Our maritime service, Enhanced Satellite AIS closed the gaps in AIS data coverage in High Traffic Zones (HTZ). Gaps in data cause lost ships, increase the difficulty in scheduling port arrivals, and have a major impact on fuel consumption models.

Ensuring the Safest Routes

As the Arctic maritime security environment continues to evolve, Spire is working on solutions to provide our customers with a strategic advantage in the region. We received funding from a Department of Defense customer to develop a WAASP dashboard, which displays real-time AIS and Spire STRATOS weather data. WAASP is currently used by various DoD customers to predict likely shipping routes up to eight hours into the future while taking into account the impact of severe weather events.

We Take Pride in Keeping People Safe

Spire supports the Federal Aviation Administration’s airspace traffic management mission through the continuous tracking of aircraft around the globe. Our aviation solutions ensure the safe delivery of personnel and resources through military transport aircraft tracking. Safe operations that are fully optimized to deliver greater revenue and efficiencies are just some of the outcomes our customers achieve with our space-based data solutions.

Staying Ahead of the Trends in Airspace

Spire provides the Naval Postgraduate School with historical ADS-B data to monitor aircraft trends in the Western North Pacific airspace region. Additionally, Spire’s enhanced aircraft data access (e.g., callsign, speed over ground, latitude and longitude, aircraft status, etc.) allowed NPS to track historical aircraft movements and run trend analyses across a variety of different criteria.

Planning Accuracy in an Uncertain World

The Spire team has been working diligently to produce more than 7,000 radio occultations each day, with plans to scale beyond 100,000 daily observations to massively impact weather forecasting skill. Weather model assimilation of RO improves daily, weekly, and monthly weather forecast accuracy around the globe. Spire’s RO profiles are used by NOAA, NASA, and USAF to greatly increase the accuracy of their numerical weather prediction models. Our GNSS-based total electron content (TEC), amplitude (S4), and phase scintillation observations provide early indicators of significant space weather events that have an impact on the military’s ability to leverage its critical communications and navigations assets. Our GNSS-Reflectometry data enables the collection of soil moisture, floods/wetlands, ocean winds, and sea ice information, aiding in the forecasting and monitoring required by NASA and NOAA.

Through NOAA’s Commercial Weather Data Pilot (CWDP), Spire provided a total of ~900 RO profiles to be ingested in NOAA’s Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model. Over the course of the data pilot, NOAA analysis highlighted the positive impact assimilation of Spire RO and ionosphere data had on model forecasting accuracy. Via our Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) with NASA, Spire provided science data, including radio occultations and total electron content data, that directly relate or lead to NASA’s Essential Climate Variables. Our ultimate end-use solution included a comprehensive catalog of data solutions consistent with the 50 GCOS Essential Climate Variables (ECV).

Our Progress Always Brings Us Back to Our Satellites

We take pride in building, owning, and operating our nanosatellites. Through our orbital services offering, we offer customers the ability to host payloads at a much lower cost than traditional space-based tracking. Costs passed on to our customers are lower due to our use of cutting-edge nanosatellite technology and rapid manufacturing processes. If you’re looking to design and launch a satellite in just six months, we can meet your deadlines and provide opportunities to scale up production and deliver full satellite constellations to orbit. Spire guarantees data pipeline security and a controlled and efficient payload integration process while enabling customers to track any signal source of interest.

We Host Payloads

Spire works with various federal customers to host their payloads on our LEMUR 3U CubeSats. We were recently selected by Key to host 2 KeyW ISR payloads on our LEMUR 3U CubeSats. This effort is focused on rapidly validating several of KeyW’s next-gen Innovative Space technologies on-orbit. In addition, NGA selected a Spire 6U Cube-Satellite design for geomagnetic data collection in support of the deployment of the Worldwide Magnetic Model (WMM).

Bring Us Your Mission Challenges

We’re always interested in new challenges. Contact us and let us know what challenges you’re looking to solve and we will respond within 24-hours. We’re a growing company and we just opened our office in Washington DC so we can better serve our clients there. Our data has many uses across multiple domains and mission sets, and we specialize in creating customized data sets that provide you with the information you need to improve your operations.