JERUSALEM, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) -- The first Israeli nanosatellite designed to communicate from space with an optical ground station was launched into space, the Israel Space Agency and Tel Aviv University (TAU) said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
The 20-cm satellite, named TAU-SAT3, was launched on SpaceX's launch vehicle Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the United States, on Tuesday.
Launched to an altitude of 550 km, TAU-SAT3 is expected to orbit the earth for about five years and carry out several scientific tasks.
Its main mission is to communicate with the new optical ground station set up on a roof on the TAU campus which can lock onto, track and collect data from the nanosatellite.
TAU-SAT3 will also conduct experiments in satellite communication at very high bit rates and in scenarios where satellite communication channels have been disrupted.
The novelty in this project is the ability of the communication systems installed in both the nanosatellite and the ground station to reconstruct the lost data in real-time using smart signal processing algorithms developed at TAU, the researchers said. ■
