L4 Constellation · 47 Instruments Active

Intelligence for a changing
planet.

Aether operates a sovereign constellation of Earth-observation spacecraft, returning calibrated insight on climate, oceans, and human systems — in near-real time, at planetary scale.

Altitude 582.4 km
Orbits / Day 15.54
Coverage Global · 4× Daily
Downlink 2.4 Gbps · X-band
Mission Elapsed Time
000d · 00:00:00.000
Constellation Live · L4-01 → L4-12 · All nominal
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Live Telemetry
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Last sync ·
01 The Practice

What we watch.

Three pillars of orbital observation. Each instrument is calibrated against ground truth at a network of twelve reference stations. Each pixel arrives with its provenance attached.

— 01.01

The climate ledger.

Atmospheric methane, CO₂, NOx, and aerosol optical depth resolved to 200 m. We close the carbon budget over 14 million km² of monitored biomes — daily, not annually.

Daily sweep200 m
— 01.02

The ocean pulse.

Sea-surface temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, and mesoscale current vectors. Twelve-hour revisit across every commercial shipping lane and every protected marine area on Earth.

12-hour revisit500 m
— 01.03

The human overlay.

Settlement growth, agricultural moisture stress, nighttime energy intensity, and post-disaster damage extent. Decision-grade context for governments, insurers, and humanitarian operators.

Sub-daily30 m
02 Live Operations

The planet, right now.

L4 ↻ Source
— · —
Velocity
— km/h
Altitude
— km
Visibility
Event Stream Live
Initialising feed…
Active Events
EONET tracked · last 24h
Sig. Quakes / wk
USGS feed · global
Geomag K-Index
NOAA SWPC · 1-min
L4 Throughput
2.41
Gbps · X-band downlink
03 Instruments

The tools we built.

Four spacecraft families. One sensor philosophy: instrument-grade calibration, geometric fidelity, and unbroken provenance from photon to product.

L4-IMG · A-ClassGen IV

Imaging spectrometer.

A 240-channel pushbroom across the 400–2500 nm window. Resolves hydrocarbon plumes, vegetation stress signatures, and shallow-water bathymetry from a 580 km orbit.

Swath
120 km
GSD
8 m · VNIR
Bands
240 · spectral
SNR
> 400 : 1
L4-SAR · B-ClassGen III

Synthetic aperture radar.

X-band quad-pol radar that sees through cloud, smoke, and the polar night. Designed for mm-scale interferometric change detection across infrastructure and ice.

Band
X · 9.65 GHz
Resolution
0.5 m · spotlight
Polarisation
Quad · HH/VV/HV/VH
Coherence
12-day repeat
L4-THM · C-ClassGen II

Thermal infrared.

Cryogenically cooled LWIR for sea-surface temperature, urban heat island monitoring, and undeclared industrial emission. Resolves a 0.05 K differential at 70 m.

Wavelength
8.0 – 12.5 μm
NEΔT
0.05 K
GSD
70 m · TIR
Detector
HgCdTe · 80 K
L4-LDR · D-ClassGen I

Atmospheric lidar.

A 532/1064 nm dual-wavelength backscatter lidar profiling aerosol, cloud, and trace-gas columns. The signal that closes our methane budget over open water.

Wavelengths
532 · 1064 nm
Vertical Res.
30 m
Pulse Rate
20 Hz
Footprint
70 m · nadir
04 The Constellation

Twelve nodes. One nervous system.

L4 flies as a single distributed instrument — twelve spacecraft on three sun-synchronous planes, downlinked across twelve ground stations on five continents.

PLANE A · 580 km GROUND SEGMENT
Active spacecraft12 / 12
Ground stations12 nodes
Average revisit6.2 hours
Data latency< 14 min
Up-time99.987 %
— The Aether Manifesto
The planet is not a metaphor. It is the only argument we will ever have. We do not save it — we choose, instrument by instrument, pixel by pixel, to see it clearly.
Aether Earth Systems · Founding Charter · L4 First Light
05 Mission Files

What it has done.

Three missions, three disciplines, three closed-loop outcomes. Each one is a working brief: the question that arrived, the instruments we flew against it, and the decision it changed on the ground.

MSN · CANOPY
2025 · Amazon basin · 4.8M km² monitored

The canopy ledger.

Continuous methane and CO₂ flux estimation over the Amazon basin, paired with sub-monthly deforestation alerts. Delivered to three national monitoring agencies under sovereign data terms.

Read the mission
MSN · WAKE
2025 · North Pacific · 1.2M vessels tracked

Ocean wake intelligence.

Dark-vessel detection at the EEZ scale, fusing SAR signatures, AIS gaps, and thermal wake persistence. Provided real-time evidence to four coast-guard agencies; thirty-one prosecutions in the first nine months.

Read the mission
MSN · FIRSTLIGHT
2024 · Türkiye · 72h response window

Post-quake damage grid.

Within seventy-two hours of the Antakya seismic event, L4-SAR delivered a building-level damage classification across 38 km² of urban fabric, directly seeding Red Crescent triage routes.

Read the mission
06 Three Pixels

Where the data lands.

The signal is only the beginning. These are three windows into a working week — rendered exactly as our analysts see them, before publication.

L4-IMG · 08.14 UTC −3.51° · −60.04°
— File 06.01 / Canopy

An old-growth signature, traced.

A single morning frame over Manaus — cloud-free, calibrated, geometrically perfect. Twelve canopy classes resolved at eight meters. The methane plume in the upper left was new this week; the agency that needed to know it had a brief on the desk by lunchtime.

14.6M
km² monitored
8 m
resolution
+1.4 σ
methane anomaly
L4-THM · 16.42 UTC 38.21° · −74.55°
— File 06.02 / Wake

Gulf Stream shoulder, late afternoon.

Thermal infrared over the Atlantic continental shelf, with the warm-core eddy printing clean against cool shelf water. Coast Guard partners run their counter-IUU vessel models against this frame nine times an hour. The bright thermal blob is a fleet operating where it shouldn't be.

0.05 K
temp resolution
1.2M
vessels tracked
47
EEZs monitored
L4-IMG · 22.18 UTC 28.61° · 77.20°
— File 06.03 / Overlay

A megacity, after midnight.

Nighttime imaging over Delhi during the late-monsoon load week. Streetlights map the arterial roads; sodium-orange industrial corridors print to the east; the dim band along the river is the floodplain residential zone whose electrification we've been tracking month-on-month for our humanitarian partner.

30 m
night res.
414
cities indexed
M / M
change cadence
07 The Company

Who is flying it.

Aether is held by sixty-three engineers, scientists, and operators — lifted from spacecraft programmes, climate institutes, and humanitarian operations across eleven nationalities.

NK
Nadia Kovač
Founder · CEO

Spacecraft systems engineer who flew her first instrument in 2009. Built the L4 mission profile on a napkin in Ljubljana, then talked thirty people into believing the napkin.

prior · ESA · Planet · Stanford GSB
AO
Adetokunbo Ọláńrewájú
Chief Mission Architect

Wrote the orbital-mechanics library that placed L4-01 through L4-12 in the right sky on the right day. Reluctant to be photographed; happy to be quoted on station-keeping.

prior · NASA JPL · Astranis
EB
Elena Berthier
Lead · Climate Science

Glaciologist by training, methane scientist by accident. Designed the L4 carbon-closure framework now in use by three national inventories.

prior · NOAA · IPCC WG-1 · LSCE
HT
Hiroshi Tanaka
VP · Ground Segment

Built the twelve ground stations and the latency-sub-fifteen-minute pipeline behind them. Once spent a weekend rebuilding an antenna in Svalbard in –28 °C.

prior · JAXA · KSAT
PS
Priya Sundaram
Head · Ocean Programmes

Marine geographer with a decade in dark-vessel intelligence. Holds the working session on Tuesdays where most of our coast-guard relationships were forged.

prior · Global Fishing Watch · UNODC
MR
Maximilian Riedel
Chief Financial Officer

Capital structurer who, ten years in, decided he wanted to fund instruments instead of yields. Closed Aether's Series B in a single afternoon.

prior · KfW · Climate Investment Funds
YC
Yara Chebli
Director · Humanitarian Ops

Was on the ground in Antakya seventy-two hours after the quake. Will be the reason the next response is faster.

prior · IFRC · MSF · UNOSAT
JV
Jens van der Velde
Principal · Spacecraft

Owns thermal margins, attitude control, and the deep, untroubled sleep of someone who has stress-tested every battery cell flying.

prior · OHB · Airbus DS
08 The Lab

What comes next.

Three programmes are in build behind the operational L4 constellation. Each is funded; each has a flight date; each will compound, not replace, what flies today.

Phase B · Flight 2027

L5 Hyperspectral.

A 400-channel hyperspectral imager at 4 m GSD. We will resolve the spectral fingerprint of every major industrial gas above background, every minor crop disease at the field level, and every algal bloom from coast to thirty kilometers out.

Build progress62 %
Phase A · Flight 2028

L6 InSAR pair.

A bistatic radar pair flown in tight formation, producing global digital elevation at one-meter vertical precision — once. After that, every centimeter of subsidence, uplift, or landslide creep, observed end-to-end.

Definition34 %
Phase 0 · Flight 2029+

Atmospheric twin.

The longest-range programme: a physics-first digital twin of the atmosphere, ingesting every L4 photon, every L5 spectrum, every L6 pixel. Forecasting climate-relevant signals at the regional scale, on a five-day operational horizon.

Concept12 %
Continuous · Always-on

The open archive.

Every product we publish, after a thirty-day commercial window, is mirrored into the open archive — free for academic, humanitarian, and sovereign use. Six hundred terabytes added in 2025; eight hundred targeted for 2026.

2026 target41 %
09 Open Roles

Join the flight.

We hire the small number of people who can build the very specific things this work demands. Roles are listed when we can describe them in plain sentences — not before.

Principal Spacecraft Thermal Engineer Spacecraft · L5 Programme Bremen / Hybrid Full-time Senior Atmospheric Retrieval Scientist Climate Science · Methane Paris / Remote-EU Full-time SAR Algorithm Engineer Radar · L4-SAR Operations Lisbon / Hybrid Full-time Director, Sovereign Partnerships (Asia-Pacific) Commercial · Government Singapore Full-time Ground Station Lead Engineer (Pacific) Ground Segment Kiritimati / Rotating Full-time · Rotation Climate Modelling Research Fellow Future Lab · Atmospheric Twin Cambridge / Remote 2-year · Funded
10 Press & Brand

For journalists.

Everything a working reporter needs to write about us accurately, on deadline. For interviews or fact-checks, the press desk is on a four-hour SLA.

PDF · Press kit

Aether 2026 press kit.

Company background, leadership bios, mission summary, instrument specifications, and approved boilerplate.

PDF · 4.2 MB
ZIP · Brand assets

Logo & mark library.

SVG and PNG logos in monochrome, full-colour, and reversed-out variants. Includes typography specimen and palette reference.

ZIP · 18.7 MB
ZIP · Imagery

Editorial image library.

Spacecraft renders, mission imagery, ground-station photography, and approved executive portraits in print and web resolution.

ZIP · 312 MB
PDF · One-pager

L4 constellation fact sheet.

Single-page reference: spacecraft families, instruments, ground segment, performance figures, data products, and accreditation.

PDF · 980 KB
CSV · Public archive index

Open archive catalogue.

Machine-readable inventory of the L4 open archive, updated nightly. Spatial coverage, temporal extent, sensor and product type.

CSV · 14.2 MB
Direct · Press desk

Speak to the press desk.

For interview requests, fact-checking, and embargoed briefings. Four-hour SLA during European working hours; eight hours otherwise.

press@aetherearth.systems
11 Get in touch

Talk to mission control.

If you are a national agency, a humanitarian operator, a climate scientist, or a journalist on deadline — this is the right form. We answer within one working day.

Headquarters Brewery Square 14
Ljubljana 1000 · Slovenia
Mission Ctrl Bremen · Cambridge · Singapore
Twelve ground stations · five continents
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