SatVu, the British high fidelity thermal intelligence company, today announced the successful launch of HotSat-3 aboard the Transporter-18 rideshare mission with SpaceX from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
The launch marks a significant milestone in SatVu’s constellation buildout. HotSat-3 is SatVu’s third 3.5m resolution mid-wave infrared (MWIR) sensing satellite and, following commissioning, will operate alongside HotSat-2 in SatVu’s current constellation.
With two operational satellites, SatVu will be able to collect high resolution thermal imagery, day and night, every 24 hours anywhere on the Earth, increasing the revisit frequency over strategically important sites for customers in the Defence & Intelligence, Economic Intelligence and Climate Resilience sectors.
A single thermal image can establish whether an individual asset or sub-component is active or idle, and identify where activity is taking place. HotSat data users can discern heat sources such as vehicle and vessel engines, generators, gas flares, petrochemical plant sub-components, pipes, rail cars, data centre power plants, maritime vessel wakes, power plant cooling effluent plumes, heavy industry facility sub-components, urban heat variations and industrial heat pollution.
Increased revisit capability is central to the value of thermal intelligence. Repeated observations create time series that reveal not just status, but also intensity and change: whether an asset is operating, how it is operating, and how that operational state is changing.
At refineries and LNG facilities, for example, high-resolution MWIR thermal data can reveal operational tempo through heat signatures at the asset and subcomponent level, helping analysts identify changes in production, shutdowns, restarts and maintenance.
For Defence & Intelligence users, the same capability provides an independent information layer for assessing activity at strategic sites and critical infrastructure alongside other data sources, including at night and in locations where ground truth may be limited or delayed.
Anthony Baker, CEO and Co-Founder of SatVu, said: “HotSat-3 is where the constellation redefines what we can deliver for customers. With two operational satellites, we will have double the capacity: customers can collect twice as much imagery, monitor twice as many sites, or return to the same site more often.
“Return to a site, day and night, and you can read its operational state by what is hot and what is not, what is on and what is off. Build those observations into a time series and you move beyond a snapshot to understanding how activity is changing. That is the operational heartbeat we are building SatVu to measure: status, intensity and change across the assets and infrastructure that matter to governments, markets and industry.”
HotSat-3 builds on the operational capability established by HotSat-2, which began delivering high-resolution thermal intelligence in June 2026. With capacity on HotSat-2 and HotSat-3 already heavily subscribed, SatVu is focused on accelerating constellation deployment with HotSats-4 and 5 already in production and launches secured.
For governments, intelligence organisations, financial institutions and enterprises monitoring critical assets, that means earlier signals, stronger independent verification and a clearer understanding of activity on the ground.
HotSat-3 will now enter commissioning ahead of the Start of Commercial Operations.
