SAN FRANCISCO — Mission Space, a Latvian startup focused on space weather monitoring, announced an agreement Jan. 20 to launch a set of high energy particle detectors later this year on a cubesat manufactured by Bulgarian startup EnduroSat.
“We tested our detectors in the stratosphere last year,” Ksenia Moskalenko, Mission Space CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews by email. “This flight will help us enhance our ground models with our own proprietary data and enable new risk-assessment features in our software cloud.”
Mission Space plans to establish a constellation of 24 satellites to monitor space weather. On the ground, Mission Space will perform data analytics in a software cloud to quantify the risks to individual satellites and to correlate spacecraft anomalies with the intensity and type of recorded high-energy particles, Moskalenko said.
Mission Space plans to make its software model of the near-Earth radiation environment available in mid-2022, before launching its Aurora-1 detectors with EnduroSat in the fourth quarter of the year.
Mission Space was founded in 2020 to offer space weather monitoring as a service. With data supplied by its constellation, Mission Space will provide data and analytics to government agencies in addition to establishing a cloud-based platform to help commercial satellite operators prepare for solar storms, assess risks and monitor radiation levels.
“We are proud to support Mission Space in creating the first commercial space weather data collecting infrastructure,” Raycho Raychev, EnduroSat founder and CEO, said in a statement. By collecting and analyzing space weather observations, Mission Space will improve the success rate and reliability of commercial and government missions, he added.
EnduroSat will be one of the first customers of Mission Space data and analytics services.
“Any space electronics must deal with near-Earth magnetic field, solar wind conditions and high energy particles,” Delyan Momchilov, EnduroSat marketing lead, said by email. “Having in-situ measurements of space weather and prediction modeling will be extremely helpful in preventing systems failures in orbit and manufacturing more robust systems.”
EnduroSat, founded in 2018, has five satellites currently in orbit. Ten more are scheduled to launch in 2022 and 2023.
EnduroSat plans to launch six Shared Satellite Service six-unit cubesats this year. A Shared Satellite Service mission on a 12u cubesat is slated to launch in late 2022 or early 2023.
