SIGMA Monitor

SIGMA Monitor is Orbital Sidekick's (OSK) monitoring platform for operators of pipelines, mines and other sites who need to know quickly when something changes on or around their assets. Ground patrols, aerial surveys and pressure sensors are costly and hard to scale across thousands of miles of infrastructure.

The platform runs on hyperspectral imagery from OSK's own GHOSt satellite constellation, whose sensors record hundreds of narrow spectral bands (OSK quotes over 500) between 400 and 2,500 nm at 8 m ground sampling distance. Sites can be revisited as often as daily. Each new capture is compared with historical data, and OSK's Spectral Intelligence™ analytics, proprietary AI and machine-learning models matched against a spectral library, identify materials and chemical change: methane plumes, liquid hydrocarbon leaks, contamination, and vehicles or construction on a pipeline right-of-way. Findings reach users as alerts, asset views and downloadable reports in the SIGMA Monitor platform, and notifications can be piped into a customer's existing systems.

OSK names energy (leak detection, right-of-way and facility security, regulatory compliance), mining (tailings storage facilities, contamination, materials identification) and agriculture and forestry (crop health, water use, invasive species) as its applications. Energy Transfer selected OSK in 2022 to monitor its Permian Basin pipeline assets, and an AWS case study names Williams, ONEOK and Energy Transfer among OSK's customers. OSK also cites its work for iPIPE, a pipeline-leak consortium, providing satellite and aerial monitoring in the Bakken and Permian basins. It reports having monitored more than 12,000 miles of pipeline, initially through airborne campaigns with its hyperspectral sensors, flagging nearly 100 suspected methane leaks, 200 suspected liquid hydrocarbon leaks and more than 300 construction-related intrusions.