GalaxEye loses contact with maiden satellite Drishti, recovery unlikely

BENGALURU: Space startup GalaxEye has lost contact with its maiden Earth observation satellite, Mission Drishti, with the company saying the likelihood of recovering the spacecraft is now low.The Bengaluru-based startup confirmed the setback on Tuesday, more than two months after the satellite was launched aboard a SpaceX mission on May 3. Mission Drishti was billed as the first OptoSAR satellite, combining optical and synthetic aperture radar capabilities in a single spacecraft.According to the company, the satellite had successfully completed a major portion of its Launch and Early Orbit Phase (LEOP), establishing communication with ground stations, validating key spacecraft systems, carrying out deployment and attitude-control operations, and demonstrating GalaxEye's in-house mission operations capability from its Bengaluru mission control centre.The company said an anomaly occurred during the final stage of LEOP, after which communication with the satellite became intermittent before being lost altogether.“Initial root cause analysis indicates that radiation effects associated with a geomagnetic solar storm likely impacted a critical onboard system. Communication with the spacecraft subsequently became intermittent and was eventually lost. While recovery efforts are ongoing, the likelihood of recovery currently appears low,” the company said in a statement.

Drishti was expected to add a rare new capability to the country’s Earth observation fleet: a satellite that can “see” through clouds, darkness and bad weather while also capturing conventional optical imagery.GalaxEye co-founder and CEO Suyash Singh had told TOI after the launch: “This will become only the 16th remote sensing satellite available to India, placing it among a small group of spacecraft. It also has capabilities considered useful for strategic and security applications, for which there are only a handful of satellites in orbit as on date.”On Tuesday Singh said the mission had nevertheless yielded valuable engineering lessons. “While the satellite experienced an anomaly following an extreme space weather event, the mission has provided invaluable engineering insights that will directly strengthen our future missions. Learning from the mission, we are accelerating our transition toward bringing a significant portion of our supply chain, manufacturing and satellite development processes in-house,” he added.GalaxEye said the mission had validated critical technologies, operational processes and infrastructure needed to build and operate advanced Earth observation spacecraft. The startup further said that it will be incorporating the lessons from Mission Drishti into its next-generation spacecraft architecture and has plans targetting to launch two new OptoSAR satellites within the next 24 months.