SatLeo launches India’s 1st thermal imaging payload on SpaceX

Ahmedabad-based spacetech startup SatLeo Labs successfully launched TAPAS-1, India's first dedicated commercial thermal imaging payload, aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare mission.Multiple payloads developed by Indian companies were successfully deployed into orbit by SpaceX's Falcon 9 in the early hours of October 2 from Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA, according to agency reports
Dhruva Space's Launching Expeditions for Aspiring Payloads (LEAP-2), which hosts multiple In-Orbit Demonstration (IOD) missions, was among the Indian payloads deployed during the mission. LEAP-2 includes a star tracker developed by France-based Sodern ArianeGroup and TAPAS-1 developed by Ahmedabad-based SatLeo Labs.Dhruva Space said LEAP-2 was successfully deployed in orbit at 1 a.m. IST on October 2. The company undertook the end-to-end launch integration of the LEAP-2 satellite with SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle, building on its experience with LEAP-I, through which Dhruva Space became the first private Indian company to undertake the launch vehicle integration of its satellite in-house.
"This extends Dhruva Space's role beyond satellite manufacturing into launch integration and end-to-end mission delivery, reinforcing its full-stack space engineering approach," the company said.
LEAP-2 will be supported by Dhruva Space's growing global ground infrastructure, including its owned and operated ground station in Luleå, Sweden. It is the first NGE-owned and operated ground station outside India authorised by the Government of India to provide Ground-Station-as-a-Service.TAPAS-1, or Thermal Access Platform for Analytics & Solutions, developed by SatLeo Labs, is India's first dedicated commercial CubeSat-category thermal payload and the opening flight of the country's first full-stack commercial thermal intelligence platform.
According to SatLeo Labs, TAPAS-1 uses Thermal Infrared (TIR) sensing to capture temperature information that is invisible to conventional optical imagery. The technology enables the in-orbit demonstration and validation of SatLeo's thermal sensing technology, payload performance and data-processing capabilities.The mission marks a category-first for India in dedicated commercial thermal long-wave infrared (LWIR) Earth observation.
Also part of the Transporter-18 mission was TakeMe2Space's MOI-IA satellite, which enables customers to run AI models on Earth-observation data directly in orbit and process imagery before transmitting the resulting insights to the ground."The 14 kg satellite carried 117 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of onboard computing capacity, 2 TB of storage, and a nine-band multispectral imager," TakeMe2Space said.These capabilities are designed to reduce the need to download large volumes of raw imagery for processing on Earth, supporting applications such as agricultural monitoring, mining and supply-chain intelligence.

Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) Chairman Pawan Kumar Goenka described the deployment of the Indian payloads as a significant development for the country's private space sector."Genuinely big day for India's private space sector. SpaceX's Transporter 18 is carrying two Indian satellites and an Indian hosted payload into orbit, all authorised by IN-SPACE," Goenka said in a post on X.He highlighted SatLeo Labs' TAPAS-1 as India's first commercial thermal imaging payload built by a private company, noting that thermal sensing can detect information beyond conventional optical imagery, including crop stress, forest fires and urban heat.Goenka also highlighted TakeMe2Space's MOI-IA for bringing AI computing to orbit and Dhruva Space's LEAP-2 for demonstrating a platform to host multiple payloads in space.In total, SpaceX's 18th Transporter rideshare mission carried 130 payloads into orbit.

(State Correspondent)