First Spacecraft of the SPHERE Federal Program: Today and Tomorrow
October, 22nd 2022 marks an important landmark for Roscosmos State Corporation. On this day SKIF-D was launched, becoming the inaugural satellite of SPHERE Project aimed at the complex development of satellite information technologies.
Today, SKIF-D is carrying out its mission in an 8 070 km polar inclined orbit which the Russian spacecraft are only beginning to populate. The satellite is used to support video conference calls.
Dmitry Stepanov, SKIF Project Manager at RESHETNEV, on the demonstrator satellite operation:
“Launching the SKIF-D demonstrator satellite first and foremost aided us in reserving the orbital frequency resource. In 2022, international telecommunication union received documentation confirming the commissioning of the satellite system and prioritized it among others.
Thanks to SKIF-D, we now have obtained flight qualification for domestic Ka-band equipment, and tested the tech for controlling and communicating with the satellite. We are also testing broadband Internet access for various communication standards.
So far, most communication sessions supported by SKIF-D are between two facilities in our company, the Antenna Field and the Concurrent Design Facility. We are employing two TT&C ground stations to support user communication, one located at the “Small Spacecraft” company at the local industrial park, the other here at RESHETNEV. We hold about 30 minutes of communication sessions per day due to the specificity of the satellite’s orbital motion pattern.
SKIF-D is also tasked with researching the radiation environment at its orbit, as it’s yet uncharted territory for Russia. To do this, it’s equipped with a dose monitoring unit developed specifically for this purpose at the Novosibirsk State University. The unit is compiling statistical data, and it’s now safe to say that the existing model of space environment at 8 070 km altitude is true to the knowledge we obtained through experiments.
The satellite is designed for three years of operation, that is, until October 2025. If it’s operable past this term, we will probably carry on with the experimentation, at least in terms of radioactivity and orbit environment statistics, and testing out various modes of operation and communication standards.
All this effort we now undertake with the demonstrator satellite is being factored into the design of the nominal SKIF constellation that is being built to provide broadband Internet access over the entire Russian territory and adjacent countries”.
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