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Nuri spaces five NEONSAT satellites seconds apart to start Korea's first home-launched constellation
Korea's Nuri rocket placed 15 satellites at about 575 km on its fifth flight, five of them the first home-launched NEONSAT Earth-observation microsatellites. The other half of the 10-satellite constellation, and the coverage it was designed for, waits on a sixth flight next year.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- The flight was Nuri's first attempt to release several primary satellites built for the same mission one after another, according to Yonhap.
- Each NEONSAT weighs under 100 kg and carries a camera that resolves 1 m objects in black-and-white and 4 m in colour, for national security and disaster monitoring.
- Liftoff came at 12:25 p.m. from the Naro Space Center's second pad, the first time Nuri has launched at its scheduled time without delay, Seoul Economic Daily reported.
- The 10 CubeSats carried alongside will run experiments on pharmaceuticals and industrial components in space and study space radiation and Earth's magnetic field.
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Why it matters
- decision Planners of later Korean constellations can now count Nuri as a flown launch option for sub-100 kg satellites; what they still have to settle is cadence and price.
- exposure NEONSAT's completion now depends on Nuri's launch cadence, so any slip in the sixth flight keeps Korea's security and disaster imaging at half the designed satellite count.
- precedent The sixth flight will repeat this release procedure, 35 to 40 seconds between satellites with a turn of the stage at each, and a second clean run would make it a repeatable Nuri service.
Five satellites released 35 to 40 seconds apart leave four gaps, so the NEONSAT part of the release took between 140 and 160 seconds [14]. At each gap the upper stage turned about 45 degrees to keep the satellites from colliding [7], roughly 180 degrees in all between the first separation and the last [15]. The CubeSats went out in pairs every 10 seconds [9], about 40 seconds from first pair to last [16]. Nuri then made a collision-avoidance maneuver and vented its remaining fuel, ending its flight about 20 minutes after liftoff [4].
I think the claim that Korea can now deploy a constellation on its own rocket holds, in a narrow form. Five of a planned ten NEONSATs are in orbit [20] [5], put there with a release sequence Nuri had not flown before [10]. The counter-thesis is scale. Five satellites of under 100 kg each come to less than 500 kg [17], under a quarter of one percent of a 200-ton rocket [18]. The three reports do not give Nuri's rated payload, a launch price or a programme budget. Without them, the cost of a constellation on Nuri, per satellite or per kilogram, cannot be worked out.
The performance the programme was built for, or rather the performance Yonhap attributes to the finished system, needs the full set. Once operational, Yonhap reports, the constellation will image the Korean Peninsula more than three times a day and revisit the same location within 24 hours [12]. Those figures belong to ten satellites. Five are up.
Yonhap's count has one loose end. The satellites deployed are Nos. 2 through 6 [7], and the five on the sixth flight complete a constellation of 10 [5]. Adding a No. 1 to that count would make 11 [19], so either No. 1 sits outside the ten or the count is off by one.
The thesis fails if the sixth flight cannot repeat the sequenced release for the remaining five. That would leave Nuri with one successful multi-satellite deployment and half a constellation. So far the record is one flight: Nuri separated its first and second stages and released the satellites at around 575 km, according to the Korea AeroSpace Administration [3].
What to watch
- KASA's confirmation of initial communications with each of the five NEONSATs, the check the Korea Herald said would come before the official outcome announcement.
- A firm date for Nuri's sixth flight, and whether it again leaves on schedule after this first on-time liftoff.