Monday, December 3rd was a big day for Astrocast. Evening at 7:34 pm Swiss time, Astrocast – a young start-up spun out of EPFL – launched its first demonstration satellite intended to test its Internet-of-Things system.
The launch, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County, went smoothly. The rocket was carrying almost 70 satellites, which were gradually put into a sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of 575km in the hours following take-off.
Astrocast’s satellite is a sort of nanosatellite characterized by a standard cubic shape estimating 10cm on each side. It comprises of three units and is roughly the span of a shoebox. This satellite is for exhibition purposes, and the second one of a similar sort will be propelled from India in January.
They represent the first in a long queue of Astrocast satellites: they will be utilized to test the framework that Astrocast intends to showcase, which will include a further 80 satellites in orbit by 2022. This Internet-of-Things (IoT) framework will associate a large number of articles everywhere throughout the Earth’s surface. It will empower Astrocast clients to screen foundation and offices remotely and at a much lower cost than existing techniques.
For instance, it will permit an organization creating water cleaning machines, proposed especially for remote African towns, to keep up them considerably more productively. The machines will have a correspondence module inside them that will send water utilization and status information a few times each day.
For setup, other two sets of ten satellites are scheduled for launch in October 2019 and early 2020. They are expected to create the first part of Astrocast’s constellation, which will cover the Earth’s entire surface.
Utilizing the satellites in these two orbital planes, the company will offer an underlying correspondence administration to various intrigued customers.