The New Year is just around the corner and it’s the perfect time to reflect on all of the milestones we achieved in 2020.
Dragonfly Aerospace Emerges from Space Advisory Company
Former employees of SCS subsidiary, Space Advisory Company (SAC), launched a new venture – Dragonfly Aerospace – which focuses on creating imagers and microsatellites intended for large imaging constellations. Dragonfly’s main goal is to reignite South Africa’s space legacy. For starters, Dragonfly Aerospace is upgrading a 3,000m² design and manufacturing facility, complete with 1,000m² of cleanrooms for constellation production of imagers and microsatellites. The facility will be capable of constructing microsatellites from 50kg to 600kg and everything from CubeSat imagers to sub-metre microsatellite imagers. Dragonfly Aerospace plans to produce up to 48 satellites per year with a production line building up to 16 satellites in parallel. The company will serve commercial and civilian space clients.
EOS DA to Launch Dragonfly High Resolution Multispectral Imagers
EOS DA will launch a satellite with two Dragonfly HR-250 imagers into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) early in 2022. The HR-250 has a resolution of 1m and can record images in 7 spectral bands. The satellite will monitor and track the human impact on nature and monitor critical changes in the environment. The HR-250 will also be responsible for providing accurate data for monitoring crop health and estimating yields, which helps optimize production and costs. The data will be updated 5-7 times more often than current market solutions, which allows producers to quickly react to changes. Integrating this multispectral imaging data into EOS Crop Monitoring will provide even more opportunities for precision agriculture. This contract includes the development, production, integration and testing of the imagers by the end of 2021. The imagers will monitor and analyze critical indicators of soil and yield conditions for agricultural companies.
International Consortium to Launch Dragonаfly Aerospace Hyperspectral Camera on D-2/AtlaCom-1Mission
The mission is designed to demonstrate Dragonfly’s miniature hyperspectral imager performance. Another goal is to assess the market interest in hyperspectral imaging data that is captured and processed as part of the program. A key instrument of the program is the “Mantis Imager” developed by Dragonfly Aerospace. The Mantis imager is a hyperspectral camera designed for remote sensing from space. Thanks to its unique software capabilities, this imager will also be able to combine any of the available 148 hyperspectral bands into on-orbit programmable multispectral bands. The mission will also be demonstrating a new high speed data transmitter from our partner CubeCom, a fundamental link in getting hyperspectral data from a CubeSat to the ground. The Imager can provide accurate data to a variety of applications such as agricultural yield, mining, vegetation change detection, and tracking pollutants. The mission will be implemented in cooperation with NanoAvionics US, Space JLTZ (Mexico), Atlacomulco Polytechnical University (Mexico) and CubeCom (South Africa).
Dragonfly Joins International Astronautical Congress
Dragonfly Aerospace was an exhibitor and Silver Sponsor of the International Astronautical Congress. This virtual exhibition was considered a big success by the organisers IAF and Dragonfly recorded very good engagement figures at our virtual booth and the three live events that we hosted. This proved that virtual events can be valuable and a good variation alongside the hopeful return of on-site events in 2021. During the exhibition, Dragonfly also announced the partnership with Earth Observing System Data Analytics (EOS DA) for two of our HR-250 imagers.
The year 2020 brought numerous challenges to our team. But together, we drank 12,548 cups of coffee, held 1851 video meetings and came out on top! Once it’s all said and done, we might just say we hit the mark as far as our goals were concerned.
The New Year is just the beginning for new ventures and new projects. We believe it will bring us even more progress and success. For now, let’s relax and enjoy the holiday spirit. See you in 2021!
Happy Holidays!
The Dragonfly Team