Space Alpha Awarded $1.7M Contract from the CSA to Develop SAR Technology for Space Exploration

Space Alpha Insights Corp. (“Alpha”), a developer of ground-breaking high-resolution, dual-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology, today announced that it has been awarded a contract by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) valued at over CAD$1.7 million, for the development of high-speed onboard processing enabled by the company’s patented SAR-XL processing technology.

As a part of the twenty-month contract, the funds will be used to complete the development of Alpha’s on-orbit SAR processing technology. This includes real-time onboard SAR image processing of both L and X-band SAR, to be implemented in future missions to low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars.

“We are thrilled and grateful to be working with the CSA on this important mission and thankful for our engineering team’s ongoing rigorous work,” explains Scott Larson, Alpha Insight’s Co-founder and CEO. “Alpha is working to change the way we see the world, collecting vast repositories of untapped data for critical missions and applications around the planet. The financial support from the CSA helps us get closer to achieving that aim, while demonstrating further confidence in our ability to push the state of the art in radar remote sensing.”

The contract follows Alpha’s seed investment in early 2021, led by Prime Movers Lab, and a recent customer contract for over US$4 million. Alpha is on track to deliver flight-ready SAR-XL satellite hardware in 2022, to provide data and analysis for applications related to infrastructure, maritime monitoring, defense, and environmental assessment.