South Africa is building a constellation of satellites to monitor maritime security and vessel communications around its territorial waters
It has launched the first three maritime domain awareness satellites (MDASats) as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-3 mission, in Florida, US. A Falcon 9 rocket was launched on 13 January 2022 from Cape Canaveral with South Africa’s satellites on board.
These were transported on the launch vehicle as part of a rideshare payload programme and deployed into in low earth orbit at an altitude of 525 km. In total, there were 105 commercial and government spacecraft including cube satellite (CubeSats), microsats, PocketQubes and orbital transfer vehicles on this rocket.
South Africa’s government plans to launch more MDASats in the coming year. The full MDASat constellation will be an operational constellation of nine CubeSats that will detect, identify and monitor vessels in near real-time in support of South African maritime domain awareness.
This launch came three years after commissioning South African nanosatellite ZACube 2 as a technology demonstrator for the MDASat constellation.
“Since its launch in 2018, ZACube-2 has been providing cutting-edge very high frequency (VHF) data exchange communication systems to the country’s maritime industry,” said South Africa’s minister of higher education, science and innovation (DSI) Blade Nzimande.
DSI has invested R27M (US$1.75M) in three years developing the MDASat constellation. It is working through the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) on this project.
The MDASat-1 launch is a significant milestone for South Africa, marking the first launch of a satellite constellation developed entirely on the African continent.
Mr Nzimande noted the lack of space professionals and engineers prompted the DSI and its entity, the National Research Foundation, to begin a human capital development programme at CPUT under the French South African Institute of Technology’s CubeSats programme.
“As part of this programme, students are taught engineering principles using CubeSats as training tools,” said Mr Nzimande.
“CubeSats are built using the same engineering principles as any other satellite, hence highly specialised and advanced skills are acquired through this programme.”
Transporter-3 was the third in SpaceX’s small satellite rideshare programme. It included relanding the Falcon 9 stage booster back at Cape Canaveral, for reuse in future launches.
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