Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
Tuesday 7th July saw the latest SpaceX rideshare mission, Transporter-17, take off when a Falcon 9 rocket took over 80 satellite payloads into orbit from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. As usual with these rideshare missions, there were several Earth Observation (EO) payloads worth noting:
Compact Advanced Satellite 500-4 (CAS500-4) is a South Korean EO mission. Its instruments include a wide-area optical camera offering a 5 metre spatial resolution with a 120 kilometre swath that will allow the imaging of the entire Korean Peninsula every three days. Its data will be used mainly by Korea’s Rural Development Administration and the Korea Forest Service to support agricultural management, forest change detection, climate change monitoring, and disaster response operations.
Three FireSat satellites, manufactured by Muon Space on behalf of nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. These were built based on a prototype launched in March 2025 and, as the name suggests, helps detect wildfires. The Earth Fire Alliance aims for a constellation of fifty and hopes to have more than twenty in orbit by 2029. It hopes to provide one hour revisit times and would be able to detect fires as small as 5 metres.
Seven GRUS-3 microsatellites for the Axelspace Corporation. These are optical satellites offering a spatial resolution of 2.2 metres with a swath of 28.3 kilometres and are focussed on locations north of 25 degrees latitude. It has seven spectral bands: Panchromatic, Blue, Green, Red, Red edge, Near-infrared, plus a Coastal Blue band effective for capturing information beneath the water surface. The data is expected to be used for applications such as vegetation health and observing shallow coastal features such as seabed topography and seagrass beds.
Hyperion GR-1 is a Greek optical EO microsatellite. It is the first of seven microsatellites being built by the Greek company Open Cosmos Aegean as part of the country’s ‘National Microsatellite Programme.’ Hyperion GR-1 offers multispectral imagery at a spatial of resolution of up to 90 centimetres. The data will be used for applications including preventing and managing natural disasters; monitoring wildfires and floods; protecting forests, water resources and the natural environment; precision agriculture and aquaculture; maritime surveillance; urban planning; and monitoring major infrastructure projects and critical facilities.
Posedònia microsatellite is the Balearic Islands’ first satellite, built by Open Cosmos and co-funded by the regional Government. It has five cameras and offers multispectral optical imaging with a 1.5 metre spatial resolution with a swath width of 10 kilometres. The data will be used for applications such as climate change monitoring, improve land management, emergency response, and data-driven decision-making
Four of Iceye’s Gen4 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites, which offer a spatial resolution down to 16 centimetre resolution with a 400-kilometre swath width.
Summary
Following on from last week’s blog discussing Russia’s new approach to satellite sovereignty, this week’s SpaceX rideshare mission sees an alternative vision with countries launching their own satellites to achieve this aim – with the Balearic Islands getting their first satellite in orbit. This democratisation of space and EO increases the quantity of data available, although adding to the number of satellites in orbit could create future problems. Satellite and data sovereignty is a key issue in the industry, and it will be interesting to see which way the wind blows on this.
