Grants and Contributions

The purpose of this CanExport Innovation agreement is to support Canadian organizations to carry out activities related to pursuing opportunities that would lead to establishing new collaborative Research and Development (R&D) partnerships between the Recipient and foreign organizations in order to support R&D on the Recipient’s technology and advance its commercialization.

This project will prepare a Canadian Earth observation SME to participate in the defence sector through two streams: (1) achieving Controlled Goods Program readiness, including personnel security clearances and establishment of digital security controls; and (2) developing a detailed business case and long-term plan for a hyperspectral maritime vessel identification product serving Canadian and allied defence customers. The project strengthens Canada's domestic space-based defence industrial capacity.

Enhance maritime intelligence monitoring through hyperspectral imaging

It advances research in this field in collaboration with Wyvern, a Canadian satellite company, as well as other academic and industry collaborators.

The purpose of the Canadian International Innovation Program (CIIP) grant agreement is to support Canadian SMEs identify international partners in CIIP target countries for industrial research and development collaboration that has good potential for commercialization.

This project will develop Wyvern’s end-to-end data pipeline for hyperspectral satellite imagery, an API-based tasking system, and a web console.

Canada’s space strategy states that “fewer than 10% of Canadian farms currently use satellite imagery, and that increasing that to just 25% by 2027 could lead to cost savings of $650M to 1.3B.” This proposal describes AgSat, a nanosatellite that will provide “hyperspectral” images of farms, enabling the optimization of water and fertilizer which in turn reduces GHG emissions and saves Canadian farmers hundreds of millions of dollars per year.  AgSat will address the lack of affordable, available, and high-resolution hyperspectral imagery. Some firms using Hyperspectral imagery have shown $20/acre savings in water and fertilizer use (Euroconsult market report, 2019). However, the technique is underutilized due to its high cost. By providing hyperspectral imagery from satellite, the price farmers pay will be reduced by over 100x compared to drones and airplanes and the imagery can be made available daily enabling farmers to use precision agriculture easily and regularly.

By the project's end, Wyvern expects a fully tested engineering model to validate design and performance before launch.

The proposed project advances Wyvern’s proprietary deployable optics technology wherein optical components of an Earth observation (EO) payload are stowed compactly on launch and unfurled in orbit.

Commercialize a satellite hyperspectral imaging platform - Budget 2021