Photo: Ground-Based Space Infrastructure Operation Center / Rosсosmos
Rostec has developed a unique non-pressurized temperature-control housing manufacturing technique for Russia’s first Kondor-FKA radar sensing satellite. This allowed to increase the service life of the product by a factor of four compared with pressurized spacecraft – from 3-5 years to 10-12 years.
Pressurized spacecraft housing decays with time from space debris impacts and other factors. This results in abnormal operating temperature conditions and satellite failure. Kondor-FKA housing made by ORPE Technologiya protects the equipment against environmental impacts and maintains the necessary operating temperature in non-pressurized conditions.
“Currently, there are more than 70 satellites on the orbit in which Rostec’s products, including Kondor-FKA, are used. The satellite housing was made using a technique which is unparalleled both in Russia and abroad. The spacecraft housing is non-pressurized which allowed to increase the service life from 3-5 to 10-12 years and manufacture it in record-breaking time – in less than three months. Moreover, thanks to this technique, the satellite weight was reduced considerably, while internal volume was increased by 15%,” said Andrey Silkin, General Director of ORPE Technologiya.
Kondor-FKA is the first Russian commercial radar remote sensing satellite. Unlike the satellites performing IR and optical surveillance, it is capable of “seeing” landscape details and even individual items more than a meter in size regardless of weather conditions and time of day. The spacecraft was deployed in Earth’s orbit on May 27 and started operating successfully.
