Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) has announced that its CIRCE space weather suite will be the first UK satellite launched by Virgin Orbit from Spaceport Cornwall later this year. CIRCE stands for ‘Coordinated Ionospheric Reconstruction Cubesat Experiment’.
The mission is for a partnership of the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).
SSTL stated that CIRCE comprises two 6U cube-satellites that will be launched into a near-polar low Earth orbit in a string-of-pearls configuration, at 555km altitude. The 6U is a 100mm x 200mm x 300mm satellite bus
A spokesperson for SSTL added, “The UK contribution to CIRCE is the In-situ and Remote Ionospheric Sensing (IRIS) suite, complementary to NRL sensors and comprising three highly miniaturised payloads.
“CIRCE will characterise a region of the space environment, the ionosphere, which is important for a range of defence and civil applications and can impact GPS, communications and sensing technology – both in space and on the ground.”
