Pono Partners: Privateer & Lumi Space changing the game in satellite tracking

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By now you may have heard a fair amount about Pono, our mighty solution to space sustainability and Earth observation data in a tiny hosted satellite payload package. You may even know it’s launching in late November on a SpaceX Falcon 9, riding along with D-Orbit’s ION space tug.

But did you know one of its many out-there features is ultra-high accuracy orbit determination? 

That’s thanks to the retroreflectors provided by our friends and partners at Lumi Space, which will add another layer of accuracy to tracking Pono-integrated satellites – and naturally, feed this better data back into Wayfinder. 

This trackability and improved collision avoidance is yet another part of Pono’s multidimensional offering to operators, which includes edge computing, dynamic tasking, and new revenue streams. It’s also yet another element of our big plan to drive more sustainable orbital highways.

“This partnership is founded on a shared commitment to making our orbital highways safer and more efficient, which expands their potential for solving problems on Earth,” Privateer CEO Alex Fielding said. “We’re glad to work with Lumi on making Pono-integrated satellites highly trackable, feeding more and better data into Wayfinder, and driving a more responsible way of operating in space.”

Lumi offers a wide variety of space situational awareness solutions, which focus on delivering the most accurate information for operating and carry the promise of improved rendezvous and proximity operations, payload return, collision avoidance, and active debris removal.

“Operators are currently using poor-quality tracking without enough high-precision data to validate and calibrate, and that is unsustainable,” Lumi CEO Hira Virdee said. “With increasing complexity and congestion in orbital operations, we aim to reduce current 99.9 percent false-positives to under 10 percent. That has huge implications for orbital operations: reducing the current deluge of noise into a trickle of critical information. 

“With better data comes the need for correct processing and interpretation, and that’s where we value this partnership.”

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