Alba Orbital Completes 3rd Successful Orbital Mission Deploying Satellites for Earth Observation & Weather Applications
The Alba Cluster X mission successfully deployed four pico-satellites in-orbit via Rocket Lab’s 26th Electron launch just 110 days after Alba’s successful flight with SpaceX in January 2022.
Glasgow, Scotland. May 6th, 2022 - Alba Orbital (“Alba Orbital” or “the Company”), a leading Y Combinator backed aerospace company, has successfully launched its 3rd orbital mission, deploying 4 satellites to orbit, for a total of 23 satellites delivered to space by the company to date.
The ‘Alba Cluster X’ mission saw Alba Orbital deploy four pocket-sized satellites known as ‘PocketQubes’ on board Rocket Lab’s 26th Electron flight, just 110 days after the company’s first flight of 2022 on SpaceX’s ‘Transporter-3’ mission which launched 13 PocketQube satellites on behalf of Alba’s rideshare clients.
The four PocketQube satellites manifested on ‘Alba Cluster X’ that flew as part of a rideshare mission from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex-1 in New Zealand on May 2nd, carried innovative optical and radio payloads to orbit designed to monitor artificial light at night (ALAN) across the globe and to serve data for weather applications. This cluster of PocketQube satellites includes Alba Orbital’s own state-of-the-art Unicorn-2F pico-satellite platform, as well as three other pico-satellites flown on behalf of Alba Orbital’s rideshare customers.
PocketQube Mission Details
Unicorn-2F is an addition to Alba Orbital’s earth observation constellation designed to provide frequent high resolution imagery of the earth at night and monitor light pollution across the globe. Night-time satellite imagery (or ‘nightlights data’) can provide vital insights into natural disasters, economic activity, socioeconomic trends, and even the impact of COVID-19.
Myradar-1, TRSI-2 and TRSI-3 are tiny 5cm ‘1p PocketQube’ satellites launched by Alba Orbital on behalf of Florida-based ACME AtronOmatic. These pico-satellites serve a technology demonstration mission for a weather data constellation called HORIS (Hyperspectral Orbital Remote Imaging Spectrometer).
“Alba Cluster X marks a number of huge milestones for us” says Alba Orbital founder and CEO, Tom Walkinshaw. “This mission is the third time that we have successfully delivered hardware to orbit. The tiny satellite form factor that we helped define is continually opening access to space and widening new space based applications as we’ve worked to lower the cost to launch for less economically privileged organizations to launch their own spacecraft and to gather actionable data from orbit.”
Alba Orbital has now launched 23 satellites to orbit and hosted a range of missions on behalf of Academic institutions, Startups and governmental clients alike. After raising a $3.4m seed round with the prestigious Y combinator program last year, Alba Orbital have scaled their launch and manufacturing processes with their targets set to launch every quarter and to provide near real time satellite imagery.
If you are thinking of sending your own payload to orbit for as low as 25K Euro or are interested in night-time satellite imagery, get in touch with the Alba Orbital team at contact@albaorbital.com 🚀