New partnership: Marble Imaging & Scanway Space

2023/11/23

Bremen, Germany and Wroclaw, Poland – Marble Imaging, a German company that develops Earth Observation (EO) services powered by a constellation of VHR-Satellites, and the Polish newspace company Scanway, which delivers advanced optical instruments for space, have announced a strategic partnership today.

The subject of the cooperation will be the joint development of the multispectral payload for a constellation of small satellites for Earth Observation owned by Marble Imaging. The targeted constellation will include up to 200 satellites weighing around 100 kg each, planned to be launched in several stages within the next decade, providing repeated global imaging in the very high-resolution sector.

“Our strategic partnership will strengthen European cooperation in the Earth Observation domain”, says Robert Hook, CEO and Co-Founder of Marble. “We’re looking forward to jointly developing cutting edge optical and multispectral payloads with Scanway for our constellation.”

The cooperation has barely begun and has already resulted in winning the prestigious German “Kleinsatelliten Nutzlastwettbewerb” competition by DLR. The award will provide the free launch by the end of 2025 of an observational telescope, along with the provision of a space operation capability for a demonstration satellite of a future constellation. The success of the demonstration satellite’s mission will be a precursor to the planned development of a constellation in which Scanway could potentially provide imaging telescopes for up to 200 microsatellites, with the company estimating a unit price of around €1 million per imaging instrument.

Scanway will be responsible for developing and supplying hardware – that is, Earth Observation telescopes that will work on board the satellites to provide the best quality data. The company’s team has more than seven years of experience in the development of optical payloads.

“An exciting task for Scanway in the project will be to deliver a telescope allowing a very high-resolution of less than one meter (targeted 0.7 meter). The company’s long-term goal is to create solutions for constellations, which involves scaling up the production process. We are aware of this challenge, that’s why from January we will have laboratory and workshop space nearly 4x larger than before thanks to Scanway’s new headquarters, and in the next few years we will implement further production scaling processes”, says Mikołaj Podgórski, COO and Co-Founder of Scanway.

The satellites will provide global data of the Earth’s surface at a targeted resolution of less than 1 (targeted 0.7) meter ground sampling distance (GSD) in the visual and Near Infrared (NIR) spectrum with a Panchromatic band. Future satellites will also be equipped with payloads for Earth observation in the Short-wave Infrared (SWIR) band. The data and derived analytics will offer valuable insights for a diverse range of clients in the EU and around the world. The cooperation between capable European companies targets to strengthen the Europe based EO industry.

“Developing our own European constellation is a big step towards breaking the dependency on the big non-European players, that are dominating the market right now”, says Alexander Epp, Co-Founder of Marble Imaging and Head of Marketing and Sales.

Marble’s role will be to process, analyze and transform the obtained EO data into added value products and services. “Our goal is to create a future where rapid and informed decision-making using up-to-date, uninterrupted, accessible and detailed EO data is seamless”, says Dr. Gopika Suresh, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy officer.

With more than a decade worth of experience in this field, the team behind Marble has aligned themselves with the core themes of sustainability and capacity building and aims to cater their analytics and insights to the needs of real-world applications and people. These include governmental organizations or commercial companies involved in environmental monitoring, implementation of sustainability and climate adaptation regulations, ensuring food security, as well as security, stability, and humanitarian aid purposes.

About Marble Imaging

Marble Imaging GmbH was founded in August 2023 in Bremen, a center of Germany’s aerospace innovation. Covering the entire spectrum of Earth Observation from mission design and management to data processing and analytics, Marble strives to set the benchmark for streamlined EO services for commercial and government customers. Marble’s founders have more than 10 years of experience in space systems and satellite data processing, and CEO Robert Hook has been responsible for managing major Earth observation projects over the past five years, including the Copernicus CO2M mission.

For more information visit www.marble-imaging.de