Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission with a payload of CubeSats took off last Friday, 16th August, from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
As usual with these rideshare missions, there was a variety of Earth Observation (EO) small satellites and nanosatellites as part of the payload.
A couple of the satellites were particularly interesting to us:
Tyche Satellite
This is an electro-optical imaging satellite built for the UK Government’s Ministry of Defence. It was built by Surrey Satellite Technology, and is the UK’s first wholly-owned military dedicated EO satellite – previously the UK military often received images from allies. The satellite will offer 5 kilometre wide scenes, and with its highest resolution it will offer 90 centimetre spatial resolution images, enabling it to be able to see battlefield troop positions and vehicles. It is in orbit at around 500 kilometres and is expected to have a mission life of 5 years, and the another interesting element is that it manoeuvres using water to create superheated steam to give thrust, rather than traditional fuel.
European Space Agency CubeSat’s
Two were part of the payload:
- Φsat-2, also known as PhiSat-2, is a CubeSat with a multispectral imager with seven spectral bands to demonstrate using artificial intelligence applications to analyse and process images in orbit. The applications on board will include cloud detection to send only clear usable images back to Earth; street map generation for disaster response situations; maritime vessel detection to support security and environmental conservation; monitoring marine ecosystems and detecting threats such as oil spills, harmful algal blooms, sediment discharges, etc.; and wildfire detection. Regular readers may recall that Pixalytics has tested this concept of processing onboard last year with work we did with D-Orbit, although the PhiSat-2 is more advanced than our original test that used a test dataset rather than captured images.
- Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS) is a prototype for a potential constellation, developed with OHB Sweden, using a cross-track scanning microwave radiometer to provide atmospheric humidity and temperature soundings.
Kanyini
Kanyini is an Australian CubeSat built by a consortium of South Australia-based companies comprising of SmartSat CRC, Inovor Technologies, and Myriota. The CubeSat is carrying an carrying an Internet of Things (IoT) instrument and a hyperspectral imager with a 1.5 metre spatial resolution. The data will be used for early bushfire detection, sensing urban heat islands, and water quality assessments. The latter application is of particular interest to Pixalytics, as we are involved in a project with SmartSat CRC and other partners, called Aquawatch AUK, looking at developing water quality assessments and we hope to use some of the data from this CubeSat within the project.
Other EO CubeSats launched included:
- io-1 and 2 are a pair of CubeSats with microwave sounder instruments for providing worldwide low latency weather data for both numerical weather prediction and long-range weather forecasts.
- Planet launched 36 more SuperDove satellites to maintain its constellation, offering multispectral 3 to 5 metre spatial resolution images. It also launched the Tanger-1 satellite, the first of Planet’s satellites offering hyperspectral imaging and it will will provide data on greenhouse gas emissions for the nonprofit Carbon Mapper Coalition.
- HYPSO 2 (Hyper-spectral Satellite for ocean observation 2) is a CubeSat mission for the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). It has a hyperspectral imager to monitor algal blooms and biological activity in the ocean.
- WREN-1 (Water Resources in Efficient Networks) is an imaging CubeSat from Hungary supporting the monitoring of water resources.
- ERNST (Experimental Spacecraft based on Nanosatellite Technology) is a demonstration CubeSat for Fraunhofer EMI with a infrared imaging payload for the German military, as well as visible light imaging and radiation detector instruments.
- Satellogic has three more of its NuSat high-resolution optical EO satellites.
- EagleEye is a Polish satellite developed by a consortium of industrial and scientific organisations led by Creotech Instruments SA. It will offer high-resolution optical images in both visible and near infrared bands, with a highest spatial resolution of just over 1 metre.
As usual on these rideshare missions, there were a number of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging CubeSats as part of the payload including:
- Capella-15 for Capella Space
- Umbra 9 and 10 for Umbra Space
- QPS-SAR-8 for Japanese company iQPS
- ICEYE launched four more SAR satellites for their constellation, including the first of seven satellites for a United Arab Emirates customer.
Conclusion
EO is an exciting sector to be working in, with innovations and developments happening all the time such as ESA’s testing of us AI in space and processing onboard the satellite. It will be interesting to see how these developments may impact the future of the industry, and whether it will save us from downloading all those cloudy scenes!
