Background

Near Space Labs is an aerial imagery and earth observation company. With high-frequency, high-resolution, low-cost stratospheric balloon imagery, they support citizens, businesses and municipalities for improved mobility, leisure and urban planning. Through an API, they give immediate access to a largest, up-to-date, city-scale imagery dataset ever generated. Every day, Near Space Labs flies their platforms, capturing city-wide imagery repeatedly. They automatically process and upload all this imagery so it can be accessed a few hours after it was taken. This means changes can be tracked over time as they happen.

Project

Near Space Labs is based in New York, but is planning a project launch in Texas. The project goal and mission is to obtain high resolution, high frequency aerial imagery of Austin, Dallas and Houston from June to August. Updated imagery of this kind can help with monitoring vegetation encroachment for utilities, trails monitoring for conservation groups, infrastructure and construction site surveying, easement monitoring, car counting for retail, and tracking oil, gas and solar energy sources. Because they operate stratospheric balloons, there are zero carbon emissions and it’s unequivocally better for the environment than obtaining imagery with airplanes

Community Impact

The applications of this type of high resolution imagery reach far and wide. It can be used in real estate to help secure deals, optimize pricing, monitor construction progress and understand the competition. It allows continuous monitoring of assets and infrastructure to uncover and address issues like pipeline leaks, vegetation encroachment and weather-induced damage. It can also be used in wildlife management and conservation to check the heath of vegetation and forests. These are just a few of the ways that a community can benefit from the highly flexible and dependable geospatial dataset that Near Space Labs provides. There is really an unlimited number of uses for this data.