Tyche was launched on Friday from a Falcon 9 rocket owned by SpaceX, the company co-founded by billionaire X owner Elon Musk.<\/p>\n
The MoD said the launch is the first step in a future constellation of satellites that will seek to strengthen the UK’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.<\/p>\n
Maria Eagle, minister for defence procurement and industry, said: “Tyche will provide essential intelligence for military operations as well as supporting wider tasks across government.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
“Tyche also shows the UK’s commitment to support innovation in science and technology, stimulating growth across the sector and supporting highly skilled jobs in the UK.”<\/p>\n
Tyche, which is about the size of a washing machine, was designed and built in the UK through a \u00a322m contract awarded to Surrey Satellites Technology Limited (SSTL) and is the first to be fully owned by the MoD.<\/p>\n
The MoD said the war in Ukraine had shown that the use of space is “crucial to military operations”.<\/p>\n
SSTL received the first signals from Tyche a few hours after lift-off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, confirming the successful launch.<\/p>\n
The 150kg satellite will operate in low-Earth orbit over a five-year lifespan.<\/p>\n
Major General Paul Tedman, UK space commander, said: “This is a fabulous day for UK space.<\/p>\n
“The successful launch of Tyche has shown that UK Space Command, and its essential partners across defence and industry, can rapidly take a concept through to the delivery of a satellite capability on orbit.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n
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The first UK military satellite which can capture daytime images and videos of the Earth’s surface has successfully launched into space. The “cutting-edge” satellite – named Tyche – is part of a Ministry of Defence (MoD) programme that aims to support military operations as well as natural disaster and environmental monitoring, mapping information development, and <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}