Chennai, March 3 (.) Indian space startup GalaxEye Space Solutions Private Ltd’s satellite is ready to be shipped to the US for its launch by SpaceX’s rocket.
“World’s First OptoSAR Satellite & India’s largest Privately Built Satellite is on its way to the launchpad,” said Suyash Singh, CEO.
Weighing about 160-170kg, this is the first of the 10 Drishti satellite constellation. It is slated to be orbited by a SpaceX rocket, Pranit Mehta, Co-Founder had said earlier.
The company plans to have its constellation in the next four years.
“For 4.5 years, we lived in the gap between a “world’s first” vision and a thousand “it’s not possible” warnings. Building deep-tech IP led startup with limited funds isn’t just a challenge; it’s a daily war against gravity and doubt. We were questioned at every turn. Every milestone was met with a “why?” or a “how?” or a or a “someone would have done it already if it were possible.” There were days when the weight of being first felt like it might break us. But we stayed. We fought. And we built it. Today, as I look at our satellite—tested, finished, and ready to ship—the emotion is hard to put into words. It’s more than hardware; it’s 1,642 days of pure grit and unshakable belief. To the team @GalaxEye that bled for this: we did the impossible. To the skeptics: thank you for the fuel. To the investors, users and our supporters: cant be more thankful The satellite is ready. And we are just getting started,” Singh said on X.com.
According to Singh, the company’s satellite is the first one in the world to have multi-sensor imaging satellite fusing all-time synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with high-resolution optical data on a single platform.
This delivers uninterrupted, all-weather visibility anytime, anywhere. Make faster, smarter decisions with unprecedented clarity, the company said.
These indigenously built satellites will enable governments, defense, and industries to perform advanced state-of-the-art geospatial analyses.
GalaxEye’s Drishti mission has a unique multi-sensor capability that brings intuitive all-time, all-weather imagery from space, even during night time and cloud cover.
Access to the image dataset will prove to be user-friendly for analysts and consumers, unlocking a plethora of opportunities and benefits, both known and unknown in the current scenario, the company claims.
Last October, GalaxEye said the satellite’s structural model underwent a round of testing at the UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC) belonging to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
As part of the test, GalaxEye’s satellite was mounted on a special purpose fixture (SPF) for testing the antenna deployment.
The satellite was also tested for its capacity to manage the vibration load of the rocket.
According to the company, the satellite was also mounted on a table to understand its centre of gravity and moment of inertia. This information will be used in the control loop of the satellite.
GalaxEye is an IIT Madras-incubated space tech startup. It was founded by a team of five students/alumni from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, who have previously worked together as part of Team Avishkar Hyperloop, a student competition team.
. VJ SAS ARN