Climate change is making the weather more severe and unpredictable, but weather satellites aren't keeping pace. For decades, it's been considered best practice to only use components that have flown in space before. As a result, weather satellites still use mainframe technologies from the 1990s.
At Care Weather, we iterate on our tiny weather satellites every two weeks, so we can afford to take risks on powerful modern electronics. We're bringing Moore's law to weather satellites. While the satellites are small, the impact is going to be big.
We aim to one day measure all aspects of the global atmosphere in real time. Today, we're miniaturizing a decades-old radar technology for measuring wind speed and direction over the surface of the ocean called scatterometry. Current scatterometers only map winds around the world twice per day, leaving scientists and forecasters blind to the hourly variability of ocean processes that lead to hurricanes, floods, and droughts costing hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of lives.
To map global ocean winds every hour, we're building Veery, the world's smallest satellite radar.Veery's small size (1U CubeSat, size of a tissue box) makes it easy to launch the 50 satellites required to achieve our mission.
Hatchling uses the 1p pocketqube form factor, making it one of the smallest satellites ever launched. This small size, enables the Care Weather team to iterate on Hatchling every 12-14 days. We started the hatchling project from scratch in December, so this iteration rate has allowed us to very rapidly arrive at a design with high performance and high reliability.