TopSat, the low cost micro-satellite designed and built by a QinetiQ-led consortium of British companies, was successfully launched for the first time this morning from the Plesetsk launch site in Northern Russia.
The 07:52 BST launch was the culmination of a programme that began in 2000 and which is jointly funded by the British National Space Centre (BNSC) and the UK Ministry of Defence.
TopSat, which is attracting increasing interest from international government and commercial customers alike, is designed to provide 2.5 metre resolution imagery at much reduced cost to larger satellites.
Typically, current generation imaging satellites with a comparable performance will cost in excess of five times more than TopSat. The system addresses many remote sensing applications including disaster relief, environmental monitoring, crop management, land use, border control and security use.
Lord Sainsbury, DTI Minister with responsibility for the BNSC and UK space policy, welcomed the news of the successful launch, saying: "TopSat is a British success story and I congratulate QinetiQ and all of the TopSat partners on their achievement. TopSat has significant commercial potential and demonstrates the UK's leadership in the emerging market for smaller, low-cost, high performance satellites."
"Today's successful launch is a great achievement for the TopSat team," said Bill Levett, TopSat Project Manager at QinetiQ. "We now look forward to the next important milestone when we start to collect valuable earth observation data and begin to provide our customers with the benefits of what is probably the world's best performance to cost ratio for any imaging satellite."
Leading the consortium of UK companies in TopSat's development, QinetiQ's role has been both in overall systems design and programme management. QinetiQ also provided the major payload electronic sub-systems.
Other partners in the project include Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd which developed the platform, satellite integration and the telecommand and control system. CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) provided the high performance camera and Infoterra Ltd is developing the market for TopSat data products.
Once deployed QinetiQ will work closely with customers to manage operations, including the direct reception of data in the field using a fully mobile, rapidly deployable low cost data ground station, known as RAPIDS. Using RAPIDS QinetiQ can provide an independent, low latency, low cost and versatile imaging capability to meet commercial and other user community needs.
The technology
