Shooting for the Stars

Pieter Fossel ’10 remembers it well. Two plants, equal in height and size, standing side by side, indistinguishable to the naked eye. 

“Then the engineer brought out a thermal camera,” he explains of his visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Fossel had traveled to meet with a leading scientist of the Landsat Missions, a group of eight Earth-observing satellites that uses remote sensors to collect data for the U.S. Geological Survey. “We were blown away. We could see the difference in temperature between a well-watered plant and an unwatered one, even though they looked identical. We thought, ‘What if we could blanket the Earth with a constellation of sensors and measure water stress in near-real time from space?’” 

Space was foremost in his mind when Fossel co-founded Hydrosat, a D.C.-based startup that compiles high-resolution thermal and infrared imagery of Earth’s increasingly hot surface. Since its 2017 launch, the company has closed on more than $17 million in venture funding to commercialize an analytics product that measures ground temperature and for a constellation of satellites that produces a global thermal infrared map — primary source material when it comes to the ever-shifting story of wildlife patterns, severe drought, and the perils of climate change. 

Many have bought in. Clients include the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, and the European Space Agency. 

“When you think about the founding of Earth Day in the 1970s, it was a direct result of the Apollo missions and the unprecedented views and pictures that astronauts were gathering from space,” says Fossel, who serves as Hydrosat’s CEO. “Seeing the planet in its entirety and how humans have an impact has a way of putting things into perspective that feels much different than seeing it on the ground.” 

Hydrosat’s beginnings have roots at St. Paul’s School, and Fossel credits much of his passion for climate action to Bill McKibben, the author, environmentalist, and founder of Third Act, a nonprofit that organizes people over the age of 60 to act on issues of climate change. McKibben spent time as a guest lecturer in Fossel’s Fifth Form Humanities class and later skied with Fossel during Nordic team practices. 

“His visit had a profound impact on me and got me to care about the environment,” Fossel says. “It ultimately influenced my study of water and clean technology issues at Georgetown and shaped my decision to found Hydrosat.” 

As receding freshwater levels, record-setting heat, and obscure weather patterns dominate headlines, Fossel and his fledgling enterprise have plans for more. Starting next year, Hydrosat will begin to launch 16 satellites that scan the globe daily for data, with the goal of making it accessible to those who want or need it, and has several more contracts in the works. Next up: the first of what Fossel hopes will be many Hydrosat-engineered satellites with proprietary technology that orbit Earth’s atmosphere. 

“We are focused on doing as much good as we can in a world that is only getting more complex,” Fossel says. “One of the things I learned at St. Paul’s was to shoot for the stars. I never imagined I would take it so literally.”