These 22-year-old space tech enthusiasts have their eyes on the moon

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These 22-year-old space tech enthusiasts have their eyes on the moon
Starting off in May 2018, Pixxel claims to be building a constellation of e

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“That’s the gap Pixxel wanted to plug,” says Awais Ahmed, Founder and CEO, Pixxel.Starting off in May 2018, Pixxel claims to be building a constellation of earth-imaging small satellites that will be able to offer a unique dataset.
Ahmed and Khandewal, incidentally, turned out to be the only Indians and this team was one of the two Asian finalist teams at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.The successful stint at Hyperloop India made the two batchmates gear up to participate in the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE Competition in February 2018.They started off with constructing AI models that could take in terabytes of satellite imagery and extract actionable insights and patterns from that data to help tackle problems in agriculture, predict yields and track the spread of certain crop pests and diseases, detect illegal mining, predict and monitor natural disasters and forest fires among other significant issues.
And even the data that was current, was not rich enough or detailed enough for a lot of these use cases,” adds Ahmed.To validate whether this was an actual problem that was being faced by people all around the world, they reached out to companies in Europe and the US that analysed satellite imagery for insights.
An almost unanimous response to the lack of information-rich space imagery, including the willingness to pay for the data, made the duo realise that there was indeed an emerging market for the new kind of satellite imagery they wanted to bring in.Eventually, Ahmed and Khandelwal ended up not continuing in the AI XPRIZE competition as they shifted concentration towards building the satellites.
Flight testing starts in February next year, which will also generate revenue from two agri-tech companies that Pixxel is in talks with currently,” reveals Ahmed

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