ION Satellite Carrier (formerly ION CubeSat Carrier) is a satellite platform developed, manufactured, and operated by

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company D-Orbit. The platform features a customizable 64U satellite dispenser capable of hosting a combination of

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s that fits the volume. Throughout a mission, ION Satellite Carrier can release the hosted satellites individually, changing orbital parameter between one deployment and the next. Each of the miniature CubeSats weighs a few kilograms. The organization also developed a D3 (D-Orbit Decommissioning Device) system, which has obtained funding from the

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and the

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, to safely dispose of satellites at the end of their lives and avoid adding to the problems created by the approximately 130 million pieces of space debris. According to D-Orbit, a space

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is feasible, and space recycling will soon be a new sector. This will involve using local resources such as dead satellites to create spaceships in space. The inaugural mission, named Origin, was launched on

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from the

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on September 3, 2020. The vehicle, named ION SCV Lucas, carried 12 SuperDove satellites from

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. On September 25, ION SCV Lucas released successfully the first SuperDove satellite of the batch; the last satellite was deployed on October 28. As of December 2023, ION SCV has successfully completed 13 missions, 1 as a payload of a

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rocket and 12 as a payload of a

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rocket. D-Orbit is a successful alumnus of the European Space Agency's incubator, ESA BIC Portugal, and the two firms collaborated on Project Sunrise, an active debris removal project, in 2019.

Mission overview

The carrier deployed CubeSats one by one using a spring release mechanism once positioned in a

Sun-synchronous orbit A Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), also called a heliosynchronous orbit, is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. More technically, it is ...

at 500 km. The 60 cm cubic dispenser allows for several combinations of 1U, 2U, 3U, 3U+, 6U, 6U+, 12U and 12U+ Cubesats along the vertical axis. After completion of the up to one month long deployment phase, ION CubeSat Carrier will initiate a validation phase of its payloads directly integrated on the platform.

Missions

Past missions

Planned missions

References

External links