Frigatebirds wings are long and pointed and can span up to 7.5 ft, the largest wing area to body weight ratio of any bird. Able to soar for weeks on wind currents, frigatebirds spend most of the day in flight hunting for food, and roost on trees or cliffs at night. One great frigatebird, being tracked by satellite in the Indian Ocean, stayed aloft for two months. They can fly higher than 4,000 meters in freezing conditions.

Fregata Space flies over the oceans to detect water pollution, its core computer is only 20s to compute 6 pollutants in a 100 km2 range; the fastest performance in machine learning applied to satellites data. Computation starts from multispectral data that measures the Earth’s reflected radiance in 13 spectral bands from VNIR to SWIR, to a tile server that shows water quality of the world to mobile apps.
Why does Fregata Space compute so fast?
Because one day the CEO said that she wanted Fregata Space to compute all the oceans in the world.
In November 2021, Fregata Space water pollution was computed by 3 engineers during 3 days and it was a problem for the company because all the intelligent resources were focused on routine work, as you can imagine, it means a bottle-neck in the most important SW cycle of the product pipeline.
Fregata Space compute every day:
2880 tiles,
6 pollution indices for any tile,
2.3 TB data from satellites and
28.8M km2 analyzed.
The idea was to start from zero with the previous knowledge and designing an event-driven SW architecture based on AWS cloud. It means to take advantage of AWS services:
- S3 data storage buckets for satellite images,
- Lambdas for data engine to search images,
- HPC for the core computer algorithms computation,
- EC2s with direct endpoint to S3 for the water analytics and
- SageMaker machine learning to Real Time calibrate own pollution algorithms.
Today February 2022, Fregata Space has the technology to compute every day:
- 2880 tiles,
- 6 pollution indices for any tile,
- 2.3 TB data from satellites and
- 28.8M km2 analyzed.
Tomorrow it will be difficult to throw pollution into the rivers, seas and oceans without being detected by Fregata Space.