Urban Sky wins NASA award to develop balloon-borne fire sensors
NASA Space Technology Urban Sky says its Series A round will allow it to expand its commercial imaging services it provides from "microballoons" in the stratosphere. Credit: Urban SkyWASHINGTON — Urban Sky, a startup developing stratospheric balloons to take high-resolution imagery, has won a multimillion-dollar NASA grant to develop a wildfire monitoring system.The Denver-based company announced June 26 it received a contract from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office for a system that will use stratospheric balloons to detect and monitor wildfires and relay that information to firefighters on the ground. The three-year award is worth about $2.6 million.The project is an evolution of earlier work Urban Sky had done under a NASA Small Business Innovation Research award to develop a small thermal infrared sensor, which the company tested on its balloons, said Andrew Antonio, chief...
