Five satellites from the US Space Development Agency will launch on SpaceX's Transporter-2 rideshare mission on June 25.
Transporter-2 will bring as many as 88 small satellites from commercial and government customers to a sun-synchronous polar orbit. Two pairs of satellites will exhibit laser communications links. One will show how data can be processed and analyzed autonomously aboard a satellite among SDA's five payloads.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory collaborated in SDA's experiments.
These are the agency's first in-space experiments since it was founded in 2019. In addition, SDA is building a network of low-earth-orbit satellites for military communications and missile defense. The first satellites are expected to be launched in late 2022.
Laser Comms Demonstration
SDA is launching Mandrake 2. According to Space News, it's a pair of tiny spacecraft outfitted with optical crosslinks initially planned to launch on SpaceX's Transporter-1 in January. However, the satellites were accidentally damaged and did not make the launch during payload processing.
Astro Digital built the satellites, and SA Photonics provided the optical links. Mandrake 2 was developed as part of DARPA's Blackjack initiative, which began in 2018 with the goal of demonstrating the utility of low-cost tiny satellites in low-Earth orbit for military operations.
A pair of CubeSats produced by General Atomics for SDA is also on Transporter-2. Space News added these items to show optical communications between satellites and satellites and a military drone aircraft.
SDA will test optical crosslinks and communication between satellites and a General Atomics Aeronautical Systems' pilotless MQ-9 Reaper drone.
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Onboard Data Processing
SDA's fifth payload is a commercial satellite dubbed YAM-3. Space News said the acronym stands for "Yet Another Mission" and was developed by Loft Orbital.
Loft Orbital, situated in San Francisco, buys satellite buses and rents out space onboard to customers who don't want to fly their own satellites. Scientific Systems Company Inc., which secured a DARPA contract to fly a demonstration for the Blackjack program's Pit Boss mission system, is the company's customer for the SDA payload. POET stands for prototype on orbit experimental testbed, and SDA recently took over the experiment.
The purpose is to demonstrate data processing onboard a space satellite and the satellite's computer's ability to analyze data from different sources, evaluate it, and send it down to ground users.
POET is an offshoot of the Blackjack Pit Boss effort, an SDA official explained. They are going to test out data fusion in orbit and that the project will strive to "load data and algorithms."
They have to move more and more of the processing into orbit to actually accomplish that because military users require data quickly.
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