EarthDaily has been awarded a $3 million task order by NASA to provide data from its EarthDaily Constellation and technical support to NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The work will test how commercial Earth observation capabilities can be brought into federal land imaging programs, with the goal of complementing the Landsat record while preserving its scientific quality.
The task order supports the Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI) commercial transition initiative, a joint NASA and USGS effort examining how commercial data can work alongside government systems. Under the contract, the agencies will assess EarthDaily Constellation data against Landsat standards and requirements. These include data quality, calibration, stability, radiometric and geometric performance, harmonizability, and fitness for purpose. The evaluation will also look at how commercial observations can support AI-ready Earth observation products built for modern data processing and machine-learning workflows.
EarthDaily CEO Don Osborne said the company was built on the same principle that underpins Landsat: measurements that can be trusted and compared over time. « Landsat has created an extraordinary scientific record of how our planet is changing, built on decades of consistent and trusted measurement, » Osborne said. « As Earth observation increasingly becomes an input to AI, that consistency becomes even more important. » He added that the work gives the company a chance to show how science-grade, AI-ready commercial observations can complement the Landsat record.
The EarthDaily Constellation is designed to measure change consistently over time. Eight of its 10 satellites are now in orbit, and together they cover 100 percent of Earth’s landmass every two days. At full operations, the company says the constellation will image about 92 percent of Earth’s landmass every day, excluding Antarctica. The satellites use a sun-synchronous orbit that supports consistent morning acquisitions, with equatorial crossing times of around 10:30 a.m. local time, and a 240-kilometer swath that enables systematic coverage of large areas.
The system collects data across 22 spectral bands spanning visible, near-infrared, short-wave infrared and thermal wavelengths. Native spatial resolution is 5 meters in the visible and near-infrared, 95 meters in the short-wave infrared and 120 meters in the thermal infrared, with no sharpening applied to create apparent detail. Dedicated water-vapor and cirrus bands support atmospheric correction and cloud identification, which the company says makes its observations analysis-ready and directly comparable from one collection to the next.
The evaluation will assess whether these capabilities can add more frequent observations to Landsat, helping users who need consistent measurements of change between acquisitions. That consistency also matters for AI. NASA has been expanding its use of advanced computing in scientific research and the analysis of complex datasets, and EarthDaily says its calibrated, standardized observations give models a stable basis for detecting meaningful change. This includes Earth observation foundation models trained on decades of Landsat imagery, as well as reanalysis and forecasting applications. Observations that can be harmonized with the Landsat archive could extend those records forward with more frequent measurements.
Working with NASA and USGS, EarthDaily will take part in experiments covering data evaluation, workflow demonstration, product evaluation and validation, standardized data structures, and uncertainty characterization. The team will test its data alongside Landsat and other reference missions, and within USGS Analysis Ready Data and NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 processing workflows. The agencies will examine whether EarthDaily data can support Landsat-grade surface reflectance and surface temperature, and whether it is compatible with long-term land imaging records.
Throughout the evaluation, EarthDaily scientists and technical teams will hold regular technical exchanges with NASA and USGS scientific and program leads on data quality, cross-calibration, algorithms, product specifications, processing workflows and data integration. Findings will be reviewed jointly as the work progresses and used to refine products and documentation. The work is also meant to identify the requirements that commercial capabilities and derived data products would need to meet for harmonization with the Landsat archive. EarthDaily describes demonstrating Landsat-aligned performance as a first step toward hybrid mission architectures that combine government and commercial assets.
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