Cosmo Intelligence is a Space Intelligence company for the mining industry. We measure millimetre-scale movement across your site from orbit and give safety and risk management teams a picture of how the ground is behaving — between inspections, across the whole facility, without sending anyone onto unstable ground.
Satellite radar measures embankment and crest deformation to millimetre precision on every pass, so slow settlement and lateral creep are visible as a trend rather than discovered during an inspection. Optical and multispectral imagery tracks pond position, freeboard and beach geometry over the same period, and the archive lets us reconstruct how the facility has behaved for years before we were engaged.
Radar interferometry covers the entire highwall rather than the handful of points where prisms and ground radar happen to be pointed. Movement rates are resolved bench by bench and tracked over time, which turns slope performance into a record you can hand to a geotechnical engineer, an insurer or a regulator.
Waste and overburden dumps are large, constantly changing and rarely instrumented to the same standard as the pit or the tailings facility. We track toe advance, crest settlement and slope movement across the whole landform, and measure how placement is progressing against the design.
What happens below ground registers at the surface. We map subsidence over active and legacy workings, follow the shape of the subsidence trough as extraction advances, and watch for the localised signatures that precede crown pillar failure or sinkhole development — including across ground held by third parties.
Leach pads settle unevenly as they are stacked and irrigated, and differential movement is what puts strain on the liner underneath. We measure settlement and lateral spreading across the stack, track solution ponding and irrigation coverage, and flag where the pad is moving differently from the rest of the facility.
The movement that precedes a collapse is usually measured in tens of millimetres a year — too slow to see, too small to feel, and easy to miss between one inspection and the next.
On 25 January 2019 the tailings dam at the Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine in Brumadinho, Brazil failed in seconds. It killed 270 people, released 11.7 million cubic metres of tailings and contaminated more than 300 kilometres of river downstream. The facility was instrumented, monitored and reported as stable. It collapsed with no apparent warning.
Afterwards, researchers went back through the satellite radar archive. Analysis published in Communications Earth & Environment found that parts of the dam wall and the tailings behind it had been deforming in a way inconsistent with normal consolidation settlement, and concluded that the timing of the collapse would have been foreseeable from that record. Separate work using the same imagery identified an emerging risk signature at least five months before the dam gave way.
The deformation involved was small and spread across the structure rather than concentrated where the instruments happened to sit. That is the gap this work exists to close. Ground instrumentation measures a set of points very precisely. Satellite radar measures the entire surface on every pass, whether or not anyone expected movement in that particular place.
The Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management was written in response to Brumadinho and sets 77 auditable requirements across 15 principles. Operators are expected to demonstrate, rather than assert, that a facility is performing as designed. Extreme and very high consequence facilities were due to conform by August 2023, and all other operating facilities by August 2025, with an accredited audit regime now forming around it.
Independent, continuous, whole-of-facility measurement is no longer a nice-to-have. It is what auditors, insurers and boards ask to see.
You send coordinates or a shapefile of the facility. Nothing is installed and no one has to be mobilised.
We process years of archive imagery to establish how the ground has already been moving, before monitoring starts.
Each new satellite pass is processed and differenced against the baseline, at an interval matched to the risk of the asset.
Deformation maps, per-point time series and threshold alerts go to the engineer responsible for the asset.
Cosmo Intelligence works with satellite radar and optical imagery to answer a narrow question well: what is moving on this site, how fast, and is it getting worse.
We source imagery from a wide range of satellite operators rather than depending on any single constellation, and analyse it with our own proprietary AI models — which means the cadence and the resolution are matched to the asset rather than to whatever one provider happens to offer.
Mines are already measured carefully, but they are measured at points — a prism here, a piezometer there, an inspection walked on a schedule. Between those points and between those dates there is ground that nobody is watching. Satellites observe the whole surface on a repeating cycle, and the difference between one pass and the next is a measurement of movement. Our work is turning that raw observation into something a geotechnical or safety and risk management team can act on: consistent, referenced to a long baseline, and delivered before the movement becomes visible from the ground.
We are independent of whoever supplies your instrumentation and independent of the site itself, which makes the record useful in the conversations where independence matters — with insurers, auditors, regulators and boards.