SAN FRANCISCO — Hydrosat announced plans June 5 to gather thermal-infrared imagery with a second satellite launching later this month on the SpaceX Transporter-14 rideshare.

VanZyl-2 has four times the imaging capacity of VanZyl-1 , Hydrosat’s first spacecraft launched in August. VanZyl-1 observes 2 million square kilometers daily.

“On our VanZyl-2 satellite we are able to image 8 million square kilometers per day,” Pieter Fossel, CEO of Washington-based Hydrosat, told SpaceNews by email. Increasing imagery capacity is “critical in providing a commercial complement for the Landsat Next program,” he added.

Like its predecessor, VanZyl-2 is equipped with a thermal imager and a multispectral camera to “meet a majority of the mission needs and requirements of Landsat users,” Fossel sa

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