Introducing Earth OnDemand

Today, the Astraea team is excited to announce the debut of Earth OnDemand: our searchable database of global analytics-ready imagery. Our team has worked countless hours developing a way for everyone to access the potential within satellite imagery. With the launch of our first public beta product, that effort begins to pay off. While this launch represents just one piece of the full Astraea platform (see our full vision HERE), the following is some context into the creation of Earth OnDemand.

Accessing Satellite Imagery is a Problem

Earth OnDemand began with the realization that finding and using Earth-observing data is overwhelming. If you’ve been following the news over the past few years, you have probably heard that companies like SpaceX and BlueOrigin are disrupting the space industry.

As human space flights get closer, the competition for launch contracts heats up

One effect of this disruption has been the multitude of Earth Observation (EO) satellites launched in recent years. There are now dozens of companies, some with hundreds of satellites, all competing for your attention. In total, there are over 600 satellites collecting petabytes of data about our planet every day.

To make matters even more complicated, most of those providers operate their own online imagery stores. Each requires a user account to browse their archive. As a result, it can take hours to understand the quality and availability of imagery and the insight you can derive from it. If your company’s data scientists and GIS professionals are anything like ours, they have more important things to do.

Earth OnDemand is the Solution

Earth OnDemand is the simplest way to find EO data, regardless of origin, resolution, or location. With our intuitive interface, you can spend more time on discovery and less on drudgery. Using Earth OnDemand, finding relevant imagery is as straightforward as defining an area and time of interest, choosing the data you want to save, and downloading an image or exporting to a CSV file or Jupyter notebook.

Here’s How to Search

Earth OnDemand is available for you to try today! Here are some simple steps to get you started. The image below is a screenshot of the application.

1. Specify a date range for your image search
2. Drag the slider to determine the appropriate level of could cover
3. Click the magnifying glass to navigate to a city or address, just like you would in your favorite mapping app
4. Click and drag the Selection Tool to draw a box around your area of interest
   - Each time you define an area of interest, Astraea’s lightning-fast query engine searches across providers and displays results
   - After searching, Earth OnDemand previews the results by showing image footprints on the map
   - The colors show you which satellite generated the image; blue swathes are MODIS, green squares are Landsat, and yellow squares are Sentinel
   - The numbers on the search panel indicate the number of multi-spectral images available for the criteria you provided
5. To download imagery, click on the footprint (and satellite operator) that provides geographic coverage of your area of interest, and the spectral data you need for analysis

What Else Does it Offer?

Besides the signature look and feel, there are a couple of other features which make Earth OnDemand stand out.

First, Earth OnDemand has a near-live data refresh. Most mapping applications offer images on a delay, sometimes as much as three years. We recognize that a lot can change in that time, so we furnish images as soon as they hit the market.

Second, we believe that the future is pixel-agnostic. The capabilities of a given data source should not hinder your analysis. That is why every brand, every data source, is treated equally in Earth OnDemand. This is more than just a philosophy; we live by it. By helping shape initiatives such as STAC, we continue to foster an open ecosystem of collaboration.

What’s next?

While we’re thrilled that Earth OnDemand is open to the public, we are even more excited about the features coming next. After all, this product is still in beta testing. In the coming months, you can look forward to:

• Imagery from more public and private providers
• A wider array of export options
• More powerful analysis tools

Check it out! Earth OnDemand is live for you to use! If you want more information and documentation of how to get started, you can head over to our Earth OnDemand product page. If you have ideas of how to improve Earth OnDemand, find a bug in the tool, or just want to give general feedback, reach out at info@astraea.earth We would love to hear from you.

We’re excited to discover how you use Earth OnDemand to explore the greatest dataset on Earth: the Earth itself!

The Astraea team
www.astraea.earth