Satellogic, a geospatial company and Tata Advanced Systems Limited (TASL) an aerospace and defence solutions player Wednesday announced their collaboration for establishing and developing local space technology capabilities in India.
This collaboration is a step in TASL’s satellite strategy and a significant milestone for Satellogic as it enters the fast-growing Indian defence and commercial market.
The project will commence with training, knowledge transfer, and local assembly of optical sub-metre resolution EO satellites, the first of which is planned to be launched as TSAT-1A.
The focus will be on manufacturing satellites and developing imagery in India for national defence and commercial applications, for which TASL is commissioning a satellite assembly, integration and test plant at its Vemagal facility in Karnataka.
“Space segment is important to TASL due to its culture of precision that will help other activities in TASL. TASL will work with local SMEs for payloads and other technologies to bolster India content,” said Sukaran Singh, chief executive officer and managing director, TASL.
TASL and Satellogic will collaborate on the development of a new satellite design and work to integrate multiple payloads on a single satellite that will generate a diverse range of data over India.
“This collaboration will accelerate space capacity building for India. It aims to enable advancement of commercial space capabilities and access to critical information for security, sustainability, and energy,” said Emiliano Kargieman, chief executive officer and founder at Satellogic, according to a release.
This contract marks Satellogic’s second Space Systems customer, following an agreement with an International Space Agency (ISA).
Satellogic and TASL have agreed to manufacture Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite; what is a LEO Satellite?
A low earth orbit (LEO) satellite is an object, that circles around the earth at lower altitudes than geosynchronous satellites. LEO satellites orbit between 2,000 and 200 kilometers above the earth. LEO satellites are commonly used for communications, military reconnaissance, spying and other imaging applications.
Most of the man-made objects orbiting earth are in LEO. Satellites made for communications benefit from the lower signal propagation to LEO. This lower propagation delay results in less latency. Being closer to the earth has an obvious benefit for many types of earth observational satellites by resolving smaller subjects with greater detail.
LEO satellites are generally less costly to place as they require a great deal less rocket power to place. As compared to geosynchronous orbiting satellites at 36,000 km, LEO travel through a much denser atmosphere and thus experience far more aerodynamic drag.
This means they require more power to travel at higher speeds and make corrections to maintain their lower orbits. Where geosynchronous satellite orbits in time with earth rotation at about 3.06 x 103 meters per second an LEO satellite might travel at 7.78 x 103 meters per second, orbiting many times a day.
LEO satellites have a much smaller field of communication with earth than a satellite at greater altitude. They also have a faster rotation around the earth. These factors necessitate a constellation of satellites to operate in concert for some applications. A constellation is a group of satellites working in concert, spaced in order to provide the required coverage.
More about Satellogic; the company ready to debut in the Indian subcontinent
Satellogic is a company specialising in Earth-observation satellites, founded in 2010 by Emiliano Kargieman and Gerardo Richarte. Satellogic began launching their Aleph-1 constellation of ÑuSat satellites in May 2016.
In January 2022 the company went public with a special purpose acquisition company(CF Acquisition Corp. V) merger. Satellogic is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq exchange.
Satellogic is building a 200+ satellite constellation as a scalable Earth observation platform with the ability to weekly remap the entire planet at high resolution to provide affordable geospatial insights for daily decision making.
Satellogic created a small, light, and inexpensive system that can be produced at scale. Each commercial satellite carries two payloads – one for high resolution multispectral imaging and another one for a hyper-spectral camera of 30 m GSD and 150 km swath (at a 470 km altitude).
Satellogic’s R&D facilities are located in Buenos Aires and Cordoba, Argentina. The AIT facility is located in Montevideo, Uruguay. The data-technology centre in Barcelona, Spain; a product-development centre in Tel Aviv, Israel; a finance office in Charlotte, USA, and there is a business development centre in Miami, USA.
Satellogic has invested in Indian space sector; Is there a need to bolster the space sector?
The net-worth of Indian Space Technologies is nothing more $3 Billion whereas countries like China, USA and other big Asian giants have net-worth of more than $30-$40 Billion. There is a rapid need to invest and grow the space sector in India.
Mike Gold an USA based expert said this when PM Modi visited USA in June ’23, “India will not only fill the void that Russia is leaving, but will far exceed it,” Gold, now Redwire’s chief growth officer, told me. “The capabilities of India to engage, to innovate, to support a more robust [industry], particularly commercial space, is going to far outstrip anything that Russia had ever been able to do.”
Gold described India as “a sleeping giant in the space world that is awakening” – albeit “one that’s been snoring loudly.” Already, the country has “done so much with so little,” he noted.
Gold believes India’s bureaucratic reforms in its space efforts are helping the country move faster in the sector. The nation’s already flown robotic missions to the moon and Mars.
But a further push toward growing its commercial market, combined with greater cooperation and investment alongside the USA “will be transformative not just for India, but for the USA and the commercial space sector as a whole,” he said.
“No one is altering their path – we’re just complementing each other relative to Artemis and the existing plans with India. And both countries will benefit greatly,” Gold said.
Apart from the business point of view it is very important to keep up with the other sleeping asian giants notably, South & North Korea and China. Recently North Korea launched a spy satellite and wreaked a havoc for Japan and South Korea. As the things remain uncertain; it’s best to stay ahead of feisty competitors.
