The Taiwan Space Agency's domestically developed star tracker is set to be part of a multi-agency rideshare flight by British firm In-Space Missions, which will include devices by Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore. The mission, dubbed Faraday Dragon, is the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region and is scheduled to launch in 2026.
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00:00Humanity has always looked to the stars and sought new ways to learn more about them.
00:06That's precisely the goal of this team at Taiwan's National Space Agency, TASA,
00:11study the stars as part of a milestone rideshare flight
00:15under a subsidiary of British defense firm BAE Systems,
00:19a mission codenamed Faraday Dragon.
00:24Frank Lowe says it's a unique opportunity for Taiwan.
00:28He supervises TASA's Global Cooperation Office,
00:32and he says that the mission scheduled to launch next year
00:35is much more than just a partnership between Taiwan and the U.K.
00:40It hosts roughly about 16 payloads from various institutes and different countries.
00:47It actually provides a good platform for TASA, you know,
00:51through this platform to cooperate and collaborate
00:55and to have the dialogue with other stakeholders in the Faraday Dragon program.
01:00The satellite, designed by InSpace Missions,
01:03is set to carry a host of devices made by Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore.
01:10It comes as BAE Systems looks to carve out a bigger stake
01:14in a booming commercial space sector,
01:16looking to take on frontrunners like SpaceX.
01:24Taiwan is still working on building up its own rocket launch capabilities.
01:29So for now, ride-sharing is the main way to send its devices into space
01:34and rack up their flight heritage,
01:37a sort of mileage count to prove that its devices work up there and work reliably.
01:43For this mission, TASA has selected its star tracker.
01:47Stars are a key navigational tool for spacecraft,
01:51and the tracker's job is to locate and identify stars
01:54so the satellite knows where it is and where it needs to go.
01:58Not an easy feat in the pitch blackness of space.
02:02To test to see whether the tracker works,
02:05the engineers can run what's called a stimulation.
02:08Now, this dark screen is not off.
02:10It's a model of what the tracker actually sees in space.
02:15Now, to the naked eye, you can barely see the specks of white that are the stars.
02:20But if you look at this screen,
02:22the tracker is not only spotting the stars that are there,
02:25but identifying them down to the ID number.
02:29Perfecting homegrown devices like the star tracker
02:32is key to Taiwan's wider goal of putting more domestically made components
02:37and satellites into space.
02:39Lo says the Faraday Dragon mission is a possible turning point for TASA
02:44and how it plans future flights of its flagship Formosat program,
02:49a series of satellite launches that started in the late 90s,
02:53which have achieved various goals like remote sensing and weather observation.
02:58We already carry out and working on our own ride-sharing project.
03:04By 2031, actually, we will launch the SoCo Pharmacet 8 and Pharmacet 9.
03:11We already reserve certain space and masks that could accommodate other parties' payload.
03:19Through learning from countries with more advanced space programs,
03:23Taiwan is vying to provide its own opportunities for other emerging players
03:29to hitch a ride on a Taiwanese satellite to the depths of space
03:33and jointly learn more about what lies beyond our Earth.
03:37Scott Huang, Howard Zhang and Joyce Zinn for Taiwan Plus.