From January 2022, 13 is the lucky number for people involved in the next frontiers of SmallSats world. On Thursday 13th January 2022, 13 PocketQubes were launched into orbit as part of SpaceX’ Transporter-3 mission using Falcon 9 rocket.
The preparation for the launch was led by Alba Orbital, which integrated the 13 nanosatellites into 5 of their deployers AlbaPod v2, manufactured by CRP Technology using professional 3D printing and Carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite material Windform XT 2.0.
Lift-off at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station occurred at 10:25:39 A.M. EST (15:25:39 GMT). The mission represents the largest PocketQubes deployment to date.
Engineer Franco Cevolini, CEO and CTO at CRP Technology, states, “Congrats to Alba Orbital and to all the teams flown with them, for all their hard work. Thursday 13th January 2022 signed a new milestone in the nanosatellites arena: we are very proud of being part as supplier of materials and technology that are integration and space-proven! The successful mission demonstrates once again the extreme value of Windform for mission critical applications.”
The mission marked another “first” as some PocketQubes involved in the mission have inaugurated a new paths:
“UNICORN-2A, 2D & 2E” are Alba Orbital’s first Earth Observation satellites designed to provide the highest resolution dataset of the earth at night;
1p “PION-BR1” is the very first satellite to be developed by a Brazilian start-up;
1p “GRIZU-263a” is Turkey's first ever pico-satellite to be launched in-orbit, it was designed and built by Turkish student team Grizu-263 Uzay Takımı.
“TARTAN-ARTIBEUS -1” is the first intermittent, orbital edge computing nanosatellite that operates with no batteries aboard the SpaceX Falcon-9 Transporter-3 mission. This open source project was developed at Carnegie Mellon University.
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