Discovery Platform

Discovery Platform is Hydrosat's catalogue and delivery service for the thermal infrared and visible/near-infrared imagery collected by its own satellites, VanZyl-1 and VanZyl-2. It gives governments, enterprises and partners one place to find, evaluate and obtain high-resolution thermal data for monitoring resources and detecting change, day or night. Each satellite carries a proprietary longwave infrared imager (two bands between 10.6 and 12.51 µm, about 70 m resolution) and a seven-band visible and near-infrared imager (about 30 m), covering a 70 km swath.

In the web-based Discovery Portal, users browse the global archive on a map, sort imagery by location, date, cloudiness and angle of capture, preview scenes and download data. A STAC-compliant API serves the same catalogue as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs that can be downloaded or streamed into users' own systems, with Python examples and a QGIS connection documented. Products range from Level-1A radiance and Level-1B top-of-atmosphere reflectance and brightness temperature (day and night) to Level-2 surface reflectance and land surface temperature, with bands compatible with Landsat and Sentinel missions. Hydrosat reports more than 500 million km² of imagery collected and a temperature error of less than 2 K.

Access is sold as a catalogue subscription, a monitoring subscription with prioritised tasking and off-nadir and nighttime collects, or single-image purchases, with a trial of up to three months over selected areas. NASA's Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition program has acquired Hydrosat datasets, and Hydrosat holds a Stage II contract from the US National Reconnaissance Office under which the NRO assesses and acquires VanZyl-1 and VanZyl-2 thermal and EO/IR data.