BRAZIL SPACE
Rio de Janeiro, Jan 13 (EFE) .- The Falcon 9 rocket of the private firm SpaceX launched this Thursday from Cape Canaveral (USA) put into orbit a small satellite developed by the Brazilian startup Pion Labs, which became in the first startup in the country to achieve this feat.
“It is a framework for Brazil. It is the first startup in the country to place a satellite in space ”, highlighted the Director of Portfolio Management of the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB), Paulo Barros, quoted in a statement from the organization.
“It is a bag satellite, which we call PocketSat (picosatellite), fully developed in Brazil. It is very important for the country that a startup is already in a position to launch such a launch ”, added the head of the state company.
Pion-Br1, a picosatellite that will study long-distance transmission capabilities over its two-year lifespan, was one of 105 small private and government customer satellites that SpaceX’s Transporter-3 mission put into heliosynchronous orbit this Thursday. .
Among the satellites that made up the payload of the Falcon 9 rocket there were also six from the Spanish firm Fossa Systems, of the 80 that plans to have operations in 2023 to facilitate IoT (internet of things) connections, and the miniature satellite “General San Martín ”, Which the Argentine government will use to provide internet access to agricultural producers in rural areas throughout the country.
The Pion-Br1, whose volume is only 125 cubic centimeters, was developed and assembled in the laboratory of the small Brazilian technology company in Sao Caetano do Sul, a municipality in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo.
“On behalf of the Brazilian Space Agency I want to congratulate the young entrepreneurs of the startup Pion Labs for the feat they achieved,” said the coordinator of Satellites and Applications of the AEB, Rodrigo Leonardi, in the same statement.
La Pion, named following the Brazilian physicist César Lattes, one of those responsible for the discovery of the subatomic particle méson pi (pion), was born in 2017 with the intention of developing rockets to present at the Spaceport American Cup (SAC), an event that happens annually in the United States.
The small company was awarded in 2020 a tender from the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology that provided it with the resources to finance the development and launch of its satellite.
The device was developed in just seven months by the founders of the company, Calvin Trubiene, Bruno Pinto Costa, Gabriel Yamato and Joao Pedro Vilas Boas, and aims to study the capacity of long distance communications for the future development of a new era for this segment in Brazil.
The technology will make it possible to collect and analyze data on long-distance communication capacity and to explore this type of transmission.
“In the long term we want to perfect these discoveries and transform them into solutions for monitoring sustainability and security, as many players in agribusiness and the preservation of the Amazon demand,” explained Trubiene.
“In a second moment, we also thought of expanding our operations to other Latin American countries,” he added.
SpaceX’s Transporter missions consist of shared trips that allow private and public institutions to assume the approximate cost of more than 50 million dollars to put the cargo into orbit.
Thursday’s launch is the second of the year following the liftoff last week from the Kennedy Space Center, also in Cape Canaveral, of another batch of nearly 50 Starlink satellites for SpaceX’s satellite internet network.
