News

SpIRIT has been operating in good health for more than 14 months in orbit, continuing to acquire data to achieve its mission objectives. In one of our Earth observations, we imaged Eastern Australia capturing the Siding Spring Observatory in NSW, the home of the 3.9m AAT telescope. From the smallest and farthest in space Australian optical telescope to the largest on …

This stunning image from the SpIRIT Loris camera captures Earth, the Moon and a reflection of the satellite itself in a single shot. The image was acquired on August 23rd 2024 while SpIRIT was over the Indian ocean. Our team was aiming at visual verification of the successful deployment command to extend the camera arm out of the spacecraft chassis, …

We are very pleased to share another important SpIRIT mission milestone. The electric thruster on board, developed and manufactured by our partner Neumann Space, has been operated successfully in orbit. You can read more about the achievement in this media release. Figure 1: Flight Model of the Neumann Drive on board the SpIRIT satellite. Image credits: Neumann Space. All SpIRIT payloads …

We’re thrilled to unveil an image of Uluru captured by the SpIRIT nanosatellite, which we think is the first time that this iconic and culturally significant landmark has been seen from space with a made-in-Australia satellite and imaging system. This extraordinary view was made possible by the University of Melbourne Loris payload aboard the SpIRIT satellite, which hosts infrared and visible …

Congratulations to Dr. Miguel Ortiz and the whole Loris team for the Best paper award (honourable mention) at the international AI4Space 2024 workshop. The paper presents a design overview of the system and strategies for mitigating impact of the space environment. To celebrate the achievement we are releasing a Loris image of central Australia, one of the first images of …

SpIRIT's Payload Management System (PMS) - the satellite instrument control unit - has been successfully operated for a near-continuous six hour period during the weekend geomagnetic storm as part of the subsystem verification and performance testing activities. PMS experienced a single anomaly about three hours into the test, which was automatically recovered by the on-board watchdog through a system reboot. Operations …

The University of Melbourne, the Italian Space Agency, Australian Space Agency and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics have announced the successful scientific operations of the HERMES Pathfinder space telescope instrument on board the SpIRIT satellite. We are thrilled about this result and we are looking forward to the discovery and study of Gamma Ray Bursts from SpIRIT operations in …

Commissioning activities on SpIRIT are progressing positively, with all University of Melbourne systems staying healthy after more than 135 days in space. Today, we are very pleased to share that a scientific paper on the Loris camera and Artificial Intelligence system has been accepted for publication and presentation at the AI4Space Workshop at the 2024 Conference on Computer Vision and …