Adaptive Imaging Software for Optimized Detection and Tracking of Thunderstorms from LEO

This Phase I effort proposes the development of ThunderTrack™, a lightning detection and tracking software suite that uses autonomous adaptive imaging strategies to optimally detect events from space during any time of the day, cluster them into flashes, and direct the platform navigation and attitude and CIS sampling approach for consistent tracking. ThunderTrack™ is a significant improvement from the current state-of-the-art, which employs fixed event detection and sampling strategies, since it optimizes lightning measurements based on the image scenes of interest. The effort will be accomplished through a strategic partnership between USRA, a space research institution and TRL11, a privately-funded, revenue-generating early stage company with expertise in developing low-latency full motion video solutions for space in limited SWaP and bandwidth constraints. Key personnel for this effort include USRA’s renowned Lightning Scientist Dr. Douglas Mach, TRL11’s Founder/CEO Nicolaas Verheem (with entrepreneurial experience building and commercializing video technology), TRL11’s Space Imaging Guru Rodney Grubbs (who has 35+ years of experience at NASA’s MSFC building imagers), and TRL11’s Stephen Long (a seasoned Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance expert who knows how to leverage images for data/science). The funding for this effort will be spent on developing this software to advance it from TRL 2 to TRL 4. This will position the technology well to be tested on the Processing Unit developed within the other project in this subtopic in Phase II. The technology developed in this Phase I has applications to better track thunderstorms from LEO, but also for a wide range of other earth and space-based observations. Beachhead commercial target markets include Satellite-based Earth Observation and In-Space Logistics. TRL11 foresees up to $2B in revenue potential from these two markets alone and plans to identify and evaluate other markets as well.