#60: Translating Satellite Data into Insights and Metrics for Infrastructure Monitoring - Elly Perets, Asterra

TerraWatch Space Podcast

Today, I am sharing an insightful discussion I had with Elly Perets, CEO of Asterra. Asterra is a startup headquartered in Israel, that offers a platform for monitoring all kinds of infrastructure, whether it is for monitoring roads, rails, dams, water utilities or even for mining - based on synthetic aperture radar (or SAR) data.

SAR, as some of you know, is pretty hard to process, but Asterra has managed to not only develop a scalable product that derives insights from SAR data but also managed to transform them into performance metrics that can be easily understood by the asset operators. I wanted to learn more about how they managed to do that.

In this episode, Elly and I discuss the interesting origin story of Asterra, their product portfolio, the challenges of using SAR, how they managed to transform complex SAR data into actionable information, why adoption of EO in the infrastructure sectors is inevitable, and more.

Shownotes

• Elly's LinkedIn
• Asterra's Website
• Locating Lithium with Asterra's Technology

[Thanks to Asterra for sponsoring this episode]

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01:15: Elly's background and how we got involved with Asterra

03:22: Overview of Asterra

08:45: Founding story - Spin-off of a Mars project

12:39: Product portfolio and use cases

17:22: Tech stack and how Asterra uses SAR

19:11: Transforming SAR technology into a commercialy scalable product

27:15: Challenges in the EO market in transforming science into value

30:57: About EO Discover Platform to provide environmental metrics

38:23: Distribution model and importance of integrating into other software

40:31: State of EO and the need for more SAR data

47:08: Why adoption of EO for infrastructure monitoring is inevitable

50:19: Wrap-up