Rendering of a Kuva Space satellite. Photo: Kuva Space

Kuva Space has won a new contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) worth 1.8 million euros ($1.9 million) as it looks to build its business in Europe. As a result, it will participate in ESA’s Civil Security from Space (CSS) program to provide advanced hyperspectral situational awareness information for monitoring and mitigating civil security and crisis events. The CSS program aims to foster the use of spaceborne solutions to act swiftly to support humanitarian responses, law enforcement, safety, and emergency events anywhere, at any time, and for the benefit of everyone. Kuva Space announced the contract on April 30.

Within the three-year R&D program, Kuva Space will test and develop on-board hyperspectral data processing, sat-to-sat, and sat-to-IoT mobile communication, demonstrated with a field study with the Finnish authorities, dedicated to enhancing border surveillance by detecting and rediscovering illegal activities along the Baltic Sea area between Finland, Estonia, and Sweden.

Kuva Space is aiming to build a hyperspectral satellite constellation and automatic AI-powered insights-as-a-service model. With three successful satellite missions, the company will launch two hyperspectral satellites and its initial services in 2024. The first one, Hyperfield-1, is scheduled to launch in July 2024. This will mark the initial stage of Kuva Space’s planned constellation, which aims to provide gapless monitoring by deploying up to 100 satellites by 2030.

“Bringing information on any emergency events to first responders as fast as we can has a huge environmental, humanitarian, and security impact. We look forward to collaboratively developing a robust solution to test the end-to-end delivery of insights to the user as part of the CSS program,” Jarkko Antila, CEO of Kuva Space, said in a statement.