The new satellite will collect 8 million square kilometers of data per day, covering the entire Earth with AI-ready data built for application developers.
WASHINGTON, D.C. / ACCESS Newswire / June 5, 2025 / Hydrosat, a company leveraging thermal satellite data and AI to address critical global challenges in food production, security, and natural resource management, announced today the upcoming launch of its latest satellite, VanZyl-2, aboard SpaceX's Transporter-14 mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. VanZyl-2 is Hydrosat's second satellite, following VanZyl-1, launched in August 2024.
Hydrosat's new satellite carries both a thermal infrared imager delivering high-resolution TIR, and a multi-spectral imager delivering 7 bands of visible and infrared data. The thermal data enables frequent and reliable access to sub-field-scale insights-and can be used to monitor vegetation health, plan efficient irrigation, measure agricultural water productivity, and detect droughts. It can also be used to monitor heat output from industrial plants, detect ships and other heat sources at night, and pinpoint areas of recent deforestation related to new facility construction, among other commercial and security use cases.
"With the upcoming launch of VanZyl-2, Hydrosat continues to build on the momentum of our first mission, advancing our goal of providing daily, high-resolution thermal infrared data with global coverage." Says Scott Soenen, CTO of Hydrosat. "VanZyl-2 will significantly increase both Hydrosat's imaging capacity and revisit rate, providing customers with more high-quality data for their applications."
With the addition of VanZyl-2, Hydrosat's constellation will collect thermal imagery over more than 10 million km² per day-an order of magnitude greater than any other commercial solution at comparable resolution. This approach allows Hydrosat satellites to continuously collect machine readable surface temperature data and is delivered primed for various AI applications.
"With the launch of VanZyl-2, Hydrosat gains comprehensive coverage at a faster rate. These machine-readable datasets can be processed automatically and ingested seamlessly into AI applications." Says Pieter Fossel, CEO of Hydrosat. "Automated analysis has been at the core of our mission from the start. We'll use this data in our products, like IrriWatch, and deliver this to other companies building their own AI applications."
Hydrosat's VanZyl-2 provides high-resolution thermal imaging that augments government datasets with more frequent, global coverage-even in remote or cloud-covered regions. This improved access enables commercial users to make smarter, more reliable data-driven decisions.
The VanZyl-1 and VanZyl-2 satellites are named in memory of Hydrosat's late co-founder Dr. Jakob van Zyl who had been the Associate Directory of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Hydrosat partnered with Muon Space in Mountain View, California for the satellite platform and with ABB and Simera Sense for manufacturing the imagers.
Hydrosat's planned launch of its proprietary VanZyl-2 satellite is the latest achievement for the innovative tech company, underscoring their commitment to address global agricultural challenges. Currently, Hydrosat's VanZyl-1 satellite-launched aboard SpaceX's Transporter-11 mission is already driving measurable improvements in farming output and profitability with high-resolution thermal infrared and visible near-infrared imagery. Hydrosat supports partners such as Bayer, SupPlant, and Nutradrip across 10 million acres of farmland in 50 countries.
For more information, visit https://hydrosat.com/.
About Hydrosat 
Hydrosat leverages thermal satellite data and AI to address critical global challenges in food production, security, and natural resource management. Hydrosat currently monitors millions of acres for customers such as NOAA, NRO, Bayer, SupPlant, and Nutradrip, who trust the company's high-resolution, timely satellite thermal imagery to deliver advanced analytics that convey precise crop yield forecasts and improved irrigation tools to agricultural, commercial, and public sector customers around the globe.
Company Press Contact:
Idris Habbassi
Director of Marketing
marketing@hydrosat.com
SOURCE: Hydrosat
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