Space to Soil

DEWSat is a 12U CubeSat designed to deliver near-real-time drought alerts to agricultural and humanitarian users by performing environmental inference onboard rather than on the ground. The system captures Red and NIR multispectral imagery, computes NDVI and VCI directly onboard, and feeds a compressed Bidirectional LSTM network - trained on NASA HLS vegetation index products and FLDAS soil moisture parameters and calibrated against SPEI-12 - to assign drought stress scores to each image tile. High-risk tiles are selectively downlinked while low-risk regions are discarded, reducing data transmission by up to 90% and compressing detection latency from days to hours. A heterogeneous FPGA-NPU-CPU architecture performs all computation within a 12U power and mass envelope, with adaptive scheduling prioritizing observations over at-risk regions. Processed outputs integrate directly with precision agriculture platforms and NASA Earthdata-compatible APIs. The architecture scales to multi-satellite constellations, supporting agricultural monitoring, climate resilience, and food security applications globally.