This mission took-off successfully on the 5th July 2019 from
Vostochny, Russia, at 05:41 UTC. The primary payload onboard
this mission was the Meteor-M #2-2 satellite. This satellite was
designed to monitor global weather, the ozone layer, the ocean
surface temperature and ice conditions to facilitate shipping in
polar regions of our planet. The satellites onboard this Soyuz
rocket were successfully delivered to three different
sun-synchronous orbits, which added another level of
technological complexity to this mission.
On this mission, Exolaunch successfully provided comprehensive
launch, mission management and integration services as well as
deployment solutions to 26 cubesats and 2 microsats from their
customers based in Europe, the USA, the Middle East and South
America. The mission was very diverse and included 26 cubesats
ranging from 0.25U to 16U, 2 microsatellites and CarboNIX, our
new shock-free microsatellite separation system with a
technological payload.
This was Exolaunch's largest small satellite cluster to date,
and it showcased our ability to handle complex launch
campaigns for a large number of satellites. This mission
utilised the flight proven EXOpod, Exolaunch's proprietary
cubesat deployer and EXObox, a sequencer to manage the
deployment of up to 50 satellites. Additionally, on this
mission, we successfully flight tested CarboNIX, Exolaunch's
brand new separation system for microsats.
The comprehensive list of customers on this mission included
some prominent startups and scientific institutions:
Momentus, NSLComm / ÅAC Clyde Space, Spire Global, German
Orbital Systems, SkyFox Labs, University of Wuerzburg,
Technical University of Berlin, Technical University of
Munich, Tallinn University of Technology, Montpellier
University
and others.
Two European commercial Earth observation microsats below 100
kg were successfully accommodated and deployed on this
mission.
A notable achievement was the successful deployment of the
world's first 16U cubesat using Exolaunch's 16U EXOpod
deployer. The Momentus X1, or
El Camino Real, 16U cubesat
was a technology demonstrator for
Momentus' water based
propulsion system.
This launch also marked the fifth launch and deployment of
Lemur-2 3U nanosatellites
under the collaboration with
Spire Global, a data and
analytics company based in San Francisco. Spire's satellite
constellation of Lemur-2 nanosatellites provides global ship
tracking and weather monitoring. These Lemur-2 satellites
carry three payloads: STRATOS GPS radio occultation payload,
the SENSE AIS-receiver and an ADS-B payload to aid in tracking
airplanes. Eight 3U satellites were launched as part of this
mission.
NSLComm's 6U cubesat
NSLSat-1, built and delivered
by AAC Clyde Space, is the
forerunner of NSLComm's planned high throughput cubesat
constellation. NSLSat-1 was testing a new kind of expandable
and flexible spacecraft antenna which hopes to offer data
rates up to 100 times more than is offered by current
smallsats.
The fifth and sixth satellites from
German Orbital Systems
constellation of D-Star ONE satellites were also part of this
rideshare cluster. The 3U cubesats were named
LightSat and
EXOCONNECT.
A 1U technology demonstrator from
SkyFox Labs, based in the
Czech Republic, called
Lucky-7 was also part of the
cluster. The main goal of the Lucky-7 is to test the first
space friendly electronic spacecraft subsystems and design
considerations in combination with modern COTS (Commercial Off
The Shelf) electrical components.
SEAM 2.0 (Small Explorer for
Advanced Missions) was a project aiming at developing,
building, launching and operating a 3U cubesat for
science-grade measurements of magnetic and electric fields in
the Earth ionosphere. The cubesat was developed by a
consortium which brought together eight partners from five
European countries
The partnership with the
Technical University of Berlin
continued and saw five satellites launched on this mission.
BEESAT-5 to
BEESAT-8 were a picosatellite
swarm mission of four 0.25U cubesats each having a mass of 330
grams. These picosatellites were for further development and
verification of miniaturized components for distributed pico-
and nanosatellite systems in the framework of the PiNaSys II
program. Whilst BEESAt-9 was a
1U cubesat that had a primary mission goal to implement a
precise position and orbit determination package and to verify
it in orbit.
Technical University of Munich's MOVE II
mission was funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as an
educational project, with the goal to develop a satellite
capable of supporting a scientific payload with challenging
requirements. The goal of the mission was to test and verify
the satellite bus.
The SONATE 3U cubesat mission
of the
University of Würzburg was a
technology demonstrator for highly autonomous payloads. One of
SONATE's primary objectives is to verify the key elements of
ASAP (Autonomous Sensor and Planning) system on-orbit.
MTCube (Memory Test CubeSat),
also called
ROBUSTA 1C (Radiation on
Bipolar Test for University Satellite Application), was a
cubesat project developed and designed at the
University of Montpellier. The
mission is to characterise the behaviour of COTS (Commercial
Off The Shelf) memories in the real space environment against
SEEs (Single Event Effects) and compare with radiation tests
conducted on the ground and mapping the SEE response of these
memories along the orbit. Two more university satellites were
deployed successfully as part of this cluster,
UTE-Ecuador and
TTÜ100. The UTE-UESOR 3U
cubesat was a space weather and ionospheric research mission
from
Ecuador Technological University.
TTÜ100 is an educational 1U-CubeSat developed at the
Tallinn University of Technology.
The primary mission was to test earth observation cameras and
high-speed X-band communications developed at the University.