Artist’s rendition of a satellite – paulfleet/123RF Stock Photo

Last Thursday saw the latest SpaceX rideshare mission take off from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission, called Transporter-18 had 130 payloads on board.

The main payload was the experimental satellite Suncatcher M1, developed by Google as part of its research moonshot to scale machine learning in space. The payload was developed in partnership with Planet Labs and has sent four Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), custom AI chips that can power Google’s Gemini for around 15 minutes at a time. The mission’s aim is to test how these chips operate under space conditions and gain further knowledge on the feasibility of operating solar-powered data centres in space.

Earth Observation Satellites

As usual with rideshare missions, there were a variety of Earth Observation (EO) missions in the payload, including:

• Eight Eaglet II satellites for Italy’s IRIDE EO programme. These satellites are the final eight in a twenty-four strong constellation which carry multispectral sensors and an Automatic Identification System (AIS) to support maritime monitoring and safety services. The satellites will be operated by the Italian Space Agency to provide data for environmental, emergency and security services.
• Altair-1 is an AI enabled EO satellite for the United Arab Emirates. The satellite carries multiple sensors including optical, shortwave infrared, thermal, and hyperspectral sensors with spatial resolution in some modes less than a metre. The onboard AI is forecast to be able to turn data into analysis-ready intelligence within minutes. It is the first of a planned ten satellite strong constellation, the other nine expected to be launched next year which will reportedly offer a four-hour revisit time for any point on Earth. The data will be used for disaster response, maritime awareness, environmental monitoring, food security, infrastructure surveillance, and national security applications. The name means ‘the flying one’ in Arabic, but also for tech geeks amongst us, it is also a reference to the Altair 8800, the 1975 computer for which Microsoft wrote its first BASIC interpreter.
• Two satellites for Tomorrow.io, S-12 and S-13, providing all-weather temperature and humidity profiles as part of their weather monitoring constellation.
• Four satellites for Finish company ICEYE, named X83, X84, X85 & X86, which are high-resolution Generation 4 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) microsatellites offering a spatial resolution down to 16 centimetres with a swath width of 150 to 400 kilometres.
• MikroGLOB-2, -3 and -4 are three satellites for the Polish Military to join the existing MikroGLOB-1 in orbit. This four strong constellation was built by Polish aerospace firm Creotech Instruments and offers the ability to obtain reconnaissance and EO imaging data. On the 6^th October the first light images of the satellite were released showing Los Angeles International Airport, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, New Orleans Airport, and the city of Dalian in China.
• Satellogic launched four optical satellites. Two NewSat Mark VI satellites, and one NewSat Mark V satellite. The final one was a Merlin.01, the first of a new constellation offering 10 spatial bands aligned with Sentinel, spatial resolution of 1 metre with an effective swath of 170 km. Once fully operational, this constellation would be capable of mapping the Earth daily.
• 2 satellites for GHGSat, Eleanor (C-18) and Aidan (C-19), to continue to grow their methane monitoring constellation, which today allows multiple daily passes of some sites to improve data collection. As is tradition with GHGSat, the two satellites were named after children of GHGSat employees.
• A second payload of a methane monitoring satellite was also onboard, as the Tanager-2 was launched for the nonprofit Carbon Mapper. Built by Planet Labs, the satellite is designed to monitor large methane releases at individual facilities and works across the oil and gas, coal, waste and agricultural sectors.
• HotSat-3 for SatVu is a satellite with a mid-wave infrared payload, designed and built by Surrey Satellite Technology, and will collect high-resolution thermal imagery for applications including defence, economic intelligence and climate monitoring.
• FOREST-20 for OroraTech is also a thermal monitoring satellite to monitor everything from human activity to wildfires.

Summary

Once again, it is exciting to see so many new EO satellites launched. Although potentially the most significant launch could be the Suncatcher M1. Given the current technology race to get data centres into orbit, rather than fighting to get them built on Earth, it will be interesting to see how the chips perform in space.