dpa
London
Images gathered by the UK military’s first satellite will be shared with allies, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said on Saturday.
The department said the war in Ukraine had shown that the use of space is “crucial” to military operations. The satellite, named Tyche, was launched on Friday from a rocket owned by SpaceX, the company co-founded by technology entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk.
Along with military information, it is intended that data from the satellite will be accessible by other UK government departments for uses including environmental disaster monitoring, mapping information development and tracking the impact of climate change globally, according to the MoD.
Tyche, which is comparable in size to a washing machine, was designed and built in the UK through a £22mn ($28mn) contract awarded to Surrey Satellites Technology Limited (SSTL) and is the first satellite to be fully owned by the MoD.
SSTL received the first signals from Tyche a few hours after lift-off that confirmed the successful launch from Vandenberg space force base, California, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Transporter 11 mission. Over a five-year life span, the 150kg satellite will provide imagery to support the UK armed forces and is the first to be launched by the MoD out of a constellation of satellites under its space-based Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) programme.
