Mission At-A-Glance:

• Customers: ICEYE, Planetary Resources, AMSAT, Spire, Astro Digital
• Launch Vehicle: PSLV
• Launch Location: India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center
• Total spacecraft: 19

Spacecraft on the PSLV C40 mission included Finland’s ICEYE-X1 SAR microsatellite, Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-6 6U asteroid prospecting demonstration cubesat, four Spire Global Lemur-2 cubesats, Astro Digital’s Landmapper-BC3, AMSAT’s Fox-1D cubesat, and others.

Spaceflight performed the cubesat integration at its Seattle Integration Facility and shipped the spacecraft to India for the PSLV-C40 mission. The PSLV rocket lifted off from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center in early January 2018 with the Cartosat-2ER navigation satellite, in addition to Spaceflight’s rideshare customers.

One first-time customer on the mission was Finland’s ICEYE with the country’s first commercial satellite, ICEYE-X1. ICEYE developed its own synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) sensor technologies suitable for satellites under 100kg in weight, making it one of the bigger payloads on the PSLV-C40 mission. This was ICEYE’s first proof-of-concept microsatellite mission with a SAR sensor as its payload and also the world’s first SAR satellite in this size, enabling radar imaging of the Earth through clouds and even in total darkness. Potential use-cases for the data are monitoring sea ice movements or marine oil spills, and prevention of illegal fishing.