EarthDaily has won a $3 million task order from NASA to provide data and technical support for a federal effort to determine whether commercial satellite imagery can work alongside government land-observation systems. The company said the work will help NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assess how commercial capabilities could be incorporated into federal land imaging programs.
The task order supports the Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI) commercial transition initiative, a joint NASA and USGS effort. Under the contract, the agencies will compare EarthDaily Constellation data with Landsat standards and requirements, including data quality, calibration, stability, radiometric and geometric performance, harmonizability, and fitness for purpose. The study will also look at how commercial observations could support AI-ready Earth observation products built for modern data processing and machine-learning workflows.
EarthDaily chief executive Don Osborne said the Landsat program has built a scientific record of how the planet is changing on the basis of consistent, trusted measurement. He said the company was founded on the same principle, that understanding change requires measurements that can be trusted and compared over time. « As Earth observation increasingly becomes an input to AI, that consistency becomes even more important », Osborne said, adding that the collaboration offers a chance to show how science-grade commercial observations can complement the Landsat record.
According to the company, eight of the planned 10 satellites in the EarthDaily Constellation are now in orbit, and together they cover 100 percent of Earth’s landmass every two days. At full operations, EarthDaily says the constellation will image about 92 percent of Earth’s landmass every day, excluding Antarctica. The satellites use a sun-synchronous orbit with equatorial crossing times of around 10:30 a.m. local time, which supports consistent morning acquisitions, and a 240-kilometer swath that allows systematic coverage of large areas.
The constellation 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, and the company says no sharpening is applied to create apparent detail. Dedicated water-vapor and cirrus bands support atmospheric correction and cloud identification, which EarthDaily says helps produce analysis-ready observations that can be compared directly from one collection to the next.
The evaluation will assess how these capabilities could complement Landsat by adding more frequent observations for users who need consistent measurements of change between acquisitions. The work is also tied to NASA’s broader efforts to expand the use of advanced computing in scientific research and in the analysis of complex datasets. EarthDaily argues that its calibrated, standardized observations give machine-learning models a stable basis for detecting meaningful change, including Earth observation foundation models trained on decades of Landsat imagery and applications in reanalysis and forecasting.
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 tests will run EarthDaily data alongside Landsat and other reference missions, and within USGS Analysis Ready Data and NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 processing workflows. The evaluation will examine whether the commercial data can support Landsat-grade surface reflectance and surface temperature, and whether it is compatible with long-term land imaging records.
Throughout the project, EarthDaily scientists and technical teams will hold regular 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 company said the effort will help define the requirements commercial capabilities and derived data products would need to meet in order to be harmonized with the Landsat archive, and that demonstrating Landsat-aligned performance would be a first step toward hybrid mission architectures combining government and commercial assets.
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