D-Orbit announced that it launched its thirteenth commercial mission, called Beyond, on December 1, using its innovative ION Satellite Carrier (ION) Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV).
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 10:19 AM PT (6:19 PM UTC) from Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Base, California. ION Satellite Carrier was then released into a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of about 560 km.
Renato Panesi, co-founder and commercial director of D-Orbit, says in a statement: “This mission, with its heterogeneous composition, perfectly shows the flexibility of our ION Satellite Carrier. This year has been extraordinarily intense, full of challenges and just as many satisfactions. We now look forward to 2024, a year that will mark the achievement of several new milestones, which we look forward to sharing with the entire industry.”
The ION Satellite Carrier is able to place satellites individually in specific orbital slots. In addition, ION can host a variety of third-party payloads, with innovative technologies developed by startups, experiments by research institutes or institutions, and established company tools to be tested in orbit.
D-Orbit’s mission control team is now conducting Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP) operations in preparation for the next operational phase.
The Mission Load
During the mission, ION will host several satellites, payloads, and third-party satellite deployers on board:
ALISIO-1, a 6U CubeSat from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and IACTEC Space, the first Earth observation satellite in the Canary Islands. Its main instrument is a DRAGO-2 (Demonstrator for Remote Analysis of Ground Observations) camera, developed by the IACTEC-Space team, which was tested on a demonstration mission earlier this year, during D-Orbit’s Dashing Through the Stars mission. DRAGO-2 is capable of obtaining high-quality multispectral images in shortwave infrared, thanks to a resolution of 50 m per pixel and a width of 32 km for an orbit of 500 km. The ALISIO-1 satellite will also include an optical laser communication module that will allow images to be sent to any optical station on Earth, at a faster speed than radio communications. ALISIO-1 aims to become a key factor in planning prevention and response to natural disasters. This mission was supported by Deimos Space, D-Orbit’s local partner in Spain. NANO FF A and NANO FF B, two 2U CubeSats from TU Berlin, are part of a project promoted by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy with funding from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The primary objective of the mission is the coordinated formation flight of both satellites in a helical orbit, a pioneering feat for TU Berlin, as it will be the first time that such compact university satellites have made a formation flight in orbit. The satellite is equipped with extended, deployable solar arrays, redundant GNSS receivers for satellite navigation, three miniaturized star trackers and four optical cameras with a resolution of 39 m pixels on the ground and a width of more than 160 km, and marks a significant milestone for TU Berlin. LOGSATS, a 3U CubeSat from Patriot Infovention, launched to demonstrate Thailand’s first satellite systems: an Internet-of-Things (IoT) communication system and an aviation monitoring system. The IoT communication system aims to implement the smart city model in the country by using information and communication technologies to improve and optimize the use of city resources, while the aviation monitoring system will support Thai manned and unmanned air traffic control. PONO 1, a 2U CubeSat from Privateer, is a compact edge computing, storage, machine learning, and data transmission system built to be available to satellite operators as a hosted payload. Consisting of a high-speed SDR communications package, an on-board computer, and a high-performance GPU cluster based on NVIDIA Orin, PONO 1 will offer powerful in-orbit computation, radiation and heat mitigation, and telemetry tracking capabilities. It is designed to provide significantly more accurate asset tracking and prediction, with retro-reflectors attached to the outside of the hardware providing ultra-high-precision orbit determination. The integration of PONO 1 will enable operators to perform AI, image processing, collision risk assessment, and avoidance tasks, while generating additional revenue through the integration of their data streams into Privateer’s developer marketplace. Z01 SuperTorquer, from Zenno Astronautics, will demonstrate the actual operation of the world’s first high-temperature superconducting electromagnets in space. Built on Zenno’s proprietary superconducting magnet technology, the Z01 enables fully autonomous, fuel-free satellite positioning and is designed to control the attitude of a spacecraft by aligning it with the Earth’s magnetic field, a world first. MI:1, a TRL11 mission that will test a prototype of the Space Aware Edge in orbit The company’s computer. RECS, a hosted payload from D-Orbit and the Space Propulsion Laboratory (SPLab) of the Politecnico di Milano, aims to better understand the behavior of nitrous oxide(N2O), a propellant already used in D-Orbit’s propulsion system, and its performance during refueling. It is part of the final PhD project of Simone La Luna, now Head of Propulsion and Thermal Engineering at D-Orbit, focused on in-orbit refueling and green propellants; the payload comprises two tanks (one full and one empty) with a valve designed to facilitate the transfer of N2Or from full to empty tank, with the aim of simulating the in-orbit refueling process between two satellites. Fluid pressure, temperature, and flow will be measured by the payload’s sensors for the duration of the entire process. AlbaPod 6P, two deployers of PocketQube 6P satellites by Alba Orbital Ltd: AlbaPod 6P is a deployer for PocketQube 6P satellites. The PocketQubes have a typically cubic shape with a side of 5 cm and a maximum mass of 250 grams, and use standard commercial electronic components. AlbaPod 6P aims to provide a reliable platform for the deployment of these small satellites, expanding the possibilities of what can be achieved with small-scale space assets. Each deployer will host a variety of PocketQube, each with its own research goals.
As this new mission progresses, D-Orbit continues to push the boundaries of innovation in space logistics and orbital transportation, working to pave the way for a future of possibilities and greater accessibility to space.
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