ION-SCV 002

ION-SCV 002 [D-Orbit]

The ION-SCV 002 Laurentius (ION - Satellite Carrier Vehicle), developed by Italian company D-Orbit, is a free-flying CubeSat deployer and technology demonstrator. The CubeSat carrier will host several CubeSats to be deployed once in orbit.

ION-SVC-2 is the first flight of the improved propulsive ION mk02 platform. Positioned in a sun-synchronous orbit at 500 km, ION-SCV 002 will deploy the hosted CubeSats one by one along the orbit in precise orbital slots, according to customer’s specifications. After the CubeSat deployment phase, which may last up to one month, ION CubeSat Carrier will initiate the in-orbit validation phase of payloads directly integrated on the platform.

During the mission, named PULSE, the ION SCV 002 Laurentius will deploy 20 CubeSats in orbit - 8 Flock-4s and 12 SpaceBEE.

It also hosts a number of non-deployable experiments, which include:

• DRAGO (Demonstrator for Remote Analysis of Ground Observations), a space camera in the near infrared to make Earth Observations developed by the IACTEC-Space programme of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC). For this mision, the DRAGO payload is integrated in a standard CubeSat structure which will connect it with the electrical and data interface of the ION Satellite Carrier.
• ARGO 1.0, a fully autonomous plug & play star tracker, developed by the Italian company EICAS AUTOMAZIONE in the frame of H2020 SME-INSTRUMENT ARGO PROJECT (GA# 738589), specifically designed for satisfying the needs of the emerging small satellites market, especially in term of cost-competitiveness. The In-Orbit Demonstration onboard the ION Satellite Carrier is focused on in orbit validation up to TRL9 of the core functionalities of the system, including attitude determination and tracking, in flight auto re-calibration of the camera model and robustness to high speed and acceleration manoeuvres.

It was launched on a Falcon-9 v1.2 in 2021 from Cape Canaveral.