Month: September 2025

Categories
GeekWire

Xplore captures a satellite snapshot of North Korea

Hyperspectral image of North Korean coastline
Xplore’s satellite captured this color-coded image in visible and near-infrared wavelengths over North Korea. ©2025 Xplore Inc.

Nine months after the launch of its first satellite, Bellevue, Wash.-based Xplore is sharing a hyperspectral view of North Korean territory as seen from orbit.

The image, captured in visible and near-infrared wavelengths by Xplore’s XCUBE-1 satellite, was unveiled today at the Seattle Space Superiority Summit at the Museum of Flight.

Xplore’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Lisa Rich, said the picture shows “semi-submerged farms that are likely rice paddies,” plus fish farms and salt flats. “This is a big reveal for us today,” Rich said.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

AI tool is built to boost the hunt for gravitational waves

Illustration: Mirrors and lasers in foreground, colliding black holes and gravitational waves in background
An illustration hints at how LIGO uses mirrors and laser beams to detect black hole collisions. (Google DeepMind Illustration)

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, has already won its researchers a Nobel Prize — and now artificial intelligence is poised to take LIGO’s search for cosmic collisions to the next level.

Google DeepMind and the LIGO team say they’ve developed an AI tool called Deep Loop Shaping that has been shown to enhance the observatory’s ability to track gravitational waves — faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are thrown off by smash-ups involving black holes and massive neutron stars.

The researchers describe the technique in a proof-of-concept study published today by the journal Science. They hope to make Deep Loop Shaping part of routine operations at LIGO’s detectors in Louisiana and on the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.

“Deep Loop Shaping is revolutionary, because it is able to reduce the noise level in the most unstable and most difficult feedback loop at LIGO,” lead author Jonas Buchli, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, told reporters.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Amazon touts gigabit data speeds in satellite test

Screenshot of internet speed test with 1287.25 Mbps showing on dial
A screenshot shows a data downlink speed in excess of 1.2 gigabits per second. (Panos Panay via X)

Amazon executives are showing off evidence that the company’s Project Kuiper satellite constellation is capable of transmitting data at speeds in excess of a gigabit per second.

The evidence is in the form of a video posted to social-media accounts, displaying an internet speed test that hit a peak downlink transfer rate of over 1.2 Gbps.

Panos Panay, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices and services, said Project Kuiper team members used Amazon’s enterprise-grade customer terminal for the test, and connected as their satellites flew above at their assigned altitude of 630 kilometers (390 miles).

“So pumped to see this, and looking forward to bringing this level of performance to our customers,” Panay wrote on LinkedIn.

Rajeev Badyal, Amazon’s vice president of technology for Project Kuiper, weighed in on LinkedIn as well. “The team set a high bar from the start, and as far as we know, this is the first commercially phased array antenna to deliver 1+ Gbps from low Earth orbit,” he wrote.

“P.S.: Uplink numbers generated as much excitement (if not more),” Badyal added. “We’ll save those for another day though…”

Get the full story on GeekWire