KhalifaSat set for launch on Monday
UAE SATELLITE HAS BEEN INTEGRATED INTO THE LAUNCH VEHICLE AND FINAL PREPARATIONS ARE BEING CARRIED OUT
Satellite integrated into the launch vehicle in Japan and final preparations are being carried out |
It’s all-systems-go for the launch of the UAE-built KhalifaSat in Japan on October 29 and the first image it will take will be a big surprise for everyone, an official said five days ahead of the launch.
KhalifaSat, the first satellite built on UAE soil by Emirati engineers, has passed the necessary functional tests and has been integrated into the launch vehicle, an HII-A rocket, in time for its launch on Monday.
Amer Al Sayegh, KhalifaSat project manager at the Mohammad Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), said engineers from the space centre are pulling out all the stops in Dubai and Japan to ensure a successful launch.
“At the moment, we’ve finished the integration of the satellite to the launch vehicle and the team is there to daily monitor the satellite telemetry, making sure nothing is going wrong with it from the day of integration to the day of the launch. The team will continue to do that even on the launch day itself,” Al Sayegh told Gulf News.
“We did our final functional test around two weeks ago and that is to verify that all the systems in the satellite are ready for launch and are performing as expected. That was done before we integrated the satellite.”
Once the rocket is launched into space at 8.08am UAE time, the flight time will be only around 15 to 20 minutes. It will take around two hours to confirm if the satellite successfully separated from the launch vehicle and to establish contact at either of two ground stations — at MBRSC in Dubai and in another facility in Norway.
Once in orbit, KhalifaSat will travel south to Australia, completing a full revolution around the Earth. The Earth observation satellite will move in a sunsynchronous motion, meaning it will travel from pole to pole to take images as the Earth rotates. The first photo that the KhalifaSat will take, however, remains a secret.
“We’d like to keep the first photo a surprise. We usually select the best place for the first photo. But I assure you it’s a unique place,” Al Sayegh said, adding the big announcement will be made next week.
This ‘unique place’ will be immortalised in a photo with a sub-metre resolution of 70cm ground sample distance (GSD). This means that each pixel of the image represents 70cm of the ground being captured, giving users the ability to recognise clear details of the subject being photographed from 613km above the Earth.