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In just under three years, a Mountain View startup launched its second weather satellite into low Earth orbit on March 5, the latest milestone in the company’s larger mission to revolutionize the way we monitor climate change from space.
Muon Space is a young startup but no stranger to Mountain View. Its founding members hail from Skybox Imaging, a satellite imagery company. Google acquired Skybox in 2014 and renamed it Terra Bella, in reference to its location on Terra Bella Avenue, according to Paul Day, Muon Space co-founder and VP of engineering.
When Google later sold Terra Bella to Planet Labs, many of the original Skybox employees went their separate ways. But then in 2021, Muon Space came together, first in a Menlo Park garage before relocating to Charleston Road in Mountain View.
“We really missed what we had done at Skybox,” Day said, adding that they built everything at the company. “We didn’t have the opportunity to go outsource. We had to build our own computer, our own batteries, our own radios. We knew how to do it, and we wanted to do that again, to build a really high-performance platform to enable a sort of new class of complex missions in space,” he said.
The Skybox model of building a fully integrated satellite was the guiding star for Muon Space, which successfully launched its first satellite, MuSat-1, last summer. With MuSat-1, the aerospace company established the first of many satellites that will form a “climate constellation” in space.
Equipped with special sensors, the satellites are designed to monitor the Earth’s ecosystems and climate conditions, providing valuable data for government agencies like NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense, as well as commercial corporations.
The launch of the company’s second satellite, MuSat-2, solidified this mission with more advanced technologies onboard. MuSat-2 is equipped with a highly configurable software-defined radio that will serve two purposes, Day said. The first is geared towards high data rate downlink communications.
“We collect a lot of data in orbit with the instrument, and we need to get it all on the ground so we can actually view it, make use of it, analyze it. So, you need a fast radio to get all that data down, and this software-defined radio does that for us,” Day said.
“But the cool part is the very same piece of hardware, we can change the software on it and that becomes our science radio,” Day said, adding that it will have GNSS reflectometry capabilities too, allowing it to operate like GPS system.
The position of MuSat-2 in low Earth orbit also is key to the radio’s functionality. It makes it possible to listen to direct signals from the satellite and ones that are bounced off Earth and come back up, Day said. The technique is particularly valuable for the kind of climate data that it can provide, like sea surface wind speeds and soil moisture.
Since MuSat-2 has only recently launched into space, no data has been collected yet, although its initial operations are looking good, Day said. “We were able to hear from the satellite really quickly after its app powered up and started talking. So that was very exciting for everyone here. It’s a big weight off of our shoulders,” he said.
The aerospace company has more launches planned in the next year and a half, with a new class of satellites that will be heavier and require more power than MuSat-2. The company is anticipating more growth at its Mountain View headquarters too, particularly in its engineering team, to match the growth in product delivery, Day said.
But as with its early satellites, Muon Space is still focused on creating carefully designed products that will last for many years and don’t take a decade to build or cost a fortune, Day said. “I think that’s the kind of balance that’s attractive honestly to commercial companies as well the government in particular because they have an expectation of higher quality levels of mission assurance, and I think we’re in a sweet spot for that,” he said.
