The NeonSat-1A, carrying a high-resolution optical camera, is designed to test the constellation capabilities of the South Korean government's Earth observation micro-satellite constellation NeonSat (New-space Earth Observation Satellite), in particular, technology improvements identified from operations of NeonSat-1 after its launch in April 2024. These technologies will, in turn, be incorporated into the next 10 NeonSats under construction, as well as providing more site re-visiting capabilities along with NeonSat-1.

The NeonSat constellation is the first satellite system developed by the government using a mass-production approach for precise monitoring of the Korean Peninsula, led by the Satellite Technology Research Center (SaTReC) at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea’s leading university dedicated to science and technology. Designed to capture near-real-time natural disaster monitoring for the Korean peninsula, KAIST’s NEONSAT constellation is a collaboration across multiple Korean academic, industry, and research institutions, including SaTReC, which is leading the program’s system design and engineering.

The NEONSAT program is funded by the Korean government’s Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT).

Previous mission: The Cosmos Will See You Now

Next mission: TBD

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[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 2 days ago

Thanks! I see it was also already a cheap and high risk mission (an $80m mars mission instead of $1B, with a new Blue origin spacecraft that had barely flown at all), so NASA are ok taking chances on it.

This part I think might be a big reason for launching instead of delaying, they found an opportunity to test a proposal for staging rockets in the future when we might want to launch many but there aren't enough launch pads to get them all up in the launch window:

The upside of the tradeoff is that it will demonstrate an “exciting and flexible way to get to Mars,” Lillis said. “In the future, if we’d like to send hundreds of spacecraft to Mars at once, it will be difficult to do that from just the launch pads we have on Earth within that month [of the interplanetary launch window]. We could potentially queue up spacecraft using the approach that ESCAPADE is pioneering.”