HawkEye 360 Inc., the world’s first commercial company to pioneer radio frequency (RF) data and analytics from space-based satellites, announced that its HawkEye Cluster 3 satellites have successfully deployed to orbit and established communications with the company’s satellite operations centre. HawkEye Cluster 3 joins the company’s HawkEye Cluster 2 on orbit as part of its second generation of advanced RF-sensing satellites.
“We’re pleased that our latest satellite cluster has reached orbit and we look forward to ramping up operations to fully integrate the satellites into our constellation to broaden our products and services,” said CEO John Serafini. “Our constellation is leading the commercial field in RF intelligence, and with the addition of our second-gen satellites, we’ll offer more frequent, timely and actionable data and insights to our government, commercial and humanitarian partners. At a milestone like this, we’re grateful for our excellent mission partners, UTIAS Space Flight Laboratory and Spaceflight, Inc., who work alongside our amazing HawkEye 360 team to make our operations possible.”
HawkEye 360’s satellites were built on a bus designed by UTIAS Space Flight Laboratory and contain a state-of-the-art RF payload developed by HawkEye 360. The trio of satellites launched from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 and was dispensed from Spaceflight, Inc.’s Sherpa-FX orbital transfer vehicle. Once tested and moved into formation, Cluster 3 will significantly expand the current constellation’s global revisit and collection capacity.
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“The increased revisit and capacity Cluster 3 brings to our constellation are essential to detecting, characterizing, and understanding the continuously changing RF activity important to our clients,” said Alex Fox, Executive Vice President for Sales and Marketing. “Seven additional clusters are fully funded and scheduled for launch in 2021 and 2022 to achieve collection revisits as frequent as every 20 minutes. Each cluster will offer new innovations to address a rapidly growing set of requirements needed by our defence, security and commerce clients. We plan on expanding the constellation past the initial ten clusters to achieve near-persistent monitoring of global RF activity, which will drive even more value and ensure our continued dominance in the industry.”
HawkEye 360 delivers a layer of intelligence — one never before commercially available — essential to understanding human activity on Earth. Today, many electronic systems across the sea, air, and land generate RF signals. The HawkEye 360 constellation detects, characterises and precisely geolocates these RF signals from a broad range of emitters, including VHF marine radios, UHF push-to-talk radios, maritime and land-based radar systems, L-band satellite devices and emergency beacons. By processing and analysing this RF data, the company delivers actionable insights and unique knowledge for national, tactical and homeland security operations, maritime domain awareness, environmental protection and a growing number of new applications, especially in the commercial sector.
