The first identifications for the sats launched on Transporter-8 have come in. Current score: 71 payloads launched; 65 deployed/3 failed to deploy/ 3 with deployment pending; 57 tracked; 19 identified
Designed and assembled at FOSSA´s headquarters, FEROX measures 60 x 20 x 2.5 cm when unfolded and weighs 2kg. It was launched 10 days ago aboard SpaceX Transporter-8 from Vandenberg Air Force Base and is now orbiting at 537km in an SSO LEO. Stay tuned for more updates on #FEROX
QuoteThe first identifications for the sats launched on Transporter-8 have come in. Current score: 71 payloads launched; 65 deployed/3 failed to deploy/ 3 with deployment pending; 57 tracked; 19 identified
Correction: the Orbiter SN3 payloads are reported to have deployed, so the current score for Trans.8 is:
71 payloads launched, 68 deployed, 3 pending; 57 tracked, 19 identified
A match?0930-EX-ST-2023 Mission 1711
RTLS from Vandenberg
NET late May [May 25]
Possibly not, M1742 was Transporter-6
The Journey of Otter Pup: the Path Forward
After deployment, Otter Pup is rotating ~100x faster than planned. Here are the steps we'll attempt over multiple months to recover the satellite:
1. Stay alive (maintain comms & power)
2. Detumble
3. Check for damage
4. Commission
Berlin, Germany / Ahmedabad, India — 03 July, 2023 — Azista BST Aerospace (ABA), the Indo-German joint venture aiming to revolutionize the mass production of small satellites for mega-constellations, and Exolaunch, a leading global provider of mission management, integration services and smallsat deployment technologies have launched and deployed AFR-1, ABA’s first satellite, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 on the Transporter-8 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on June 12, 2023 2:35pm PT.
The ABA First Runner (AFR-1) is carrying a payload destined for Earth observation, using an electro-optical sensor with a medium-resolution Ground Sample Distance (GSD) to image a large area. AFR-1 rolled off the ABA factory floor as a showcase of the joint venture’s manufacturing capabilities catering to mass producing satellites in a short amount of time. The satellite model spearheaded by AFR-1 is based on a modular bus which can host a wide variety of payloads with little to no software or hardware updates.
Good progress by @18thSDS today on identifying the objects from Transporter 8. Of 70 payloads released so far , 51 (i.e. 73%) have now been identified. The largest object still missing is the defunct Orbiter SN3.
In a July 24 interview, Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said the company was still working with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation for a reentry license for the spacecraft.
Update on the Otter Pup Mission
Starfish is excited to announce the successful stabilization of Otter Pup on-orbit, less than two months after the satellite was deployed rotating at over 330 degrees per second. Read our full update for more on this incredible engineering effort:
New object cataloged from the Transporter-8 launch. It's in among the mass of objects in the 520 km range, so not another ION deployment (ION moved to a higher orbit). We were indeed missing one payload from the count- now 72 objects tracked vs 72 expected, with 12 unidentified
...
Unidentified sats from T8 are now: FEROX 1 to 4, Pleiades, Skykraft 3D, MDQSAT 1C/1D, ROM-2, Unicorn-2I, SATLLA-2I, and Orbiter SN3. Orbiter is most likely object AE, the only unidentified object with 'medium' rather than 'small' RCS and the one with the lowest drag (red in plot)
💡 Technical #Breakthrough!
@aerospacelab_
successfully closed the link between its VSP-150 #satellite, Gregoire, and its optical ground-station (OGS) in Louvain-la-Neuve. 📡
Receiving optical signals from our satellites is key for demonstrating Aerospacelab’s free optical #space communication (#FSOC) capabilities. This opens the door to high-speed and secure data transfers from space to ground but also in-orbit. 🛰
✅The team can now prove similar links with its other satellites.
✅#Aerospacelab is one of the few companies in the world to demonstrate this capability with both fully in-house designed optical space and ground segments.
✅ This milestone also showcases the agility and performance of the VSP-150 satellite platform.
✅This link closure is the first step in the development of our FSOC technologies, enabling more features to be tested soon, both in orbit and on ground.
Check out this video from our sky-wide camera picking up the satellite signal. 📽