Fostering Global Awareness

“We now have enough satellites in orbit to make it possible to gather data as often as every hour over high priority regions. Revisit and capacity will continue to improve as we launch additional satellites this year”, says John Serafini, CEO, HawkEye 360, in a conversation with Geospatial World

Due to geo-political volatility and frequent disruptions, the use of satellite monitoring has escalated globally, leading to a sustained demand for more innovative products and services. What is your innovation strategy to stay ahead of the curve?

We always had a big vision to move fast. We introduced this new commercial RF satellite technology and have been building the market from scratch. We are still early in the technology development curve, though we engage closely with our customers, learning their unique requirements, and feeding that continuously into our R&D. We also follow the small satellite method of incremental improvements for each set of new satellites. Quarter by quarter, we can point to better metrics for our ground processing software and the quality of our data products.

After the recent launch of three satellites for IndoPacific maritime domain awareness, would you be looking at bigger market engagement and expansion in Asia?

The Cluster 6 satellites are the first in the

HawkEye constellation to enter an inclined orbit, boosting revisit rates over the mid-latitude regions of the globe. The RF data we collect will benefit visibility of maritime activity across Asia. I would like to reference a Tweet from Dr. Ely Ratner, who is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the United States.

Upon our launch in January, he was kind enough to post, “Big day for the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA). Today, we celebrated the launch of a new satellite cluster, which will deliver a faster, wider, and sharper maritime picture to partners across the region.”

What is the future outlook of Hawkeye 360 towards digital transformation?

We are not only deploying a high-quality RF sensing constellation, but also world-class RF data processing and analytics that enhance usability of what we can deliver to solve customer problems. We have an end-to-end secure network from our satellites to AWS GovCloud, protecting the data to satisfy the rigorous requirements of our government defence and intelligence users. Our data science team is applying Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to interpret the data and generate value for our customers.

Tell us something about your latest offerings?

We now have enough satellites in orbit to make it possible to gather data as often as every hour over high priority regions. Revisit and capacity will continue to improve as we launch additional satellites this year. Our GPS Interference monitoring has become a powerful offering.

We have also broadened the types of devices we can detect and the raw data we can provide to our hard-core defence and intelligence users. But I’m most excited about new maritime domain awareness analytics we will be release later this year that will transform finding and tracking dark vessels.

What is the Hawkeye vision towards social resilience?

Among the many applications of our RF data, we can improve security of marine sensitive areas and help monitor illegal fishing activity. Marine ecosystems collapse if not properly regulated. Better visibility of ships and patterns of life can inform Coast Guards and authorities on how to prevent illegal activities that devastate the marine environment. Knowledge is a powerful tool and HawkEye 360 is helping fill gaps in people’s understanding of our world.