Our Australian built and operated cube satellite has won the SmallSat Mission of the Year award at the ‘Space Oscars’ ceremony in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Backed by voting Australians and supported by the judges, Waratah Seed won in of a field of 10 missions, including finalists from NASA Goddard, the European Space Agency, Purdue University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University.
Waratah Seed is a 6-unit cube satellite (CubeSat) with a diverse scientific and commercial payload backed by the NSW Government, SmartSat CRC , space companies, and a consortium of universities led by the University of Sydney.
See details of the payload at this link .
Waratah Seed was the only Australian finalist in the SmallSat Mission of the Year, hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Mission leader Professor Iver Cairns said:
“We are all thrilled to have won this award. It is testament to the engineering and scientific ingenuity of our team at the University of Sydney, UTS, Macquarie University and our industry partners at Saber Astronautics, Delta-V and the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at UNSW.
“We thought our little Aussie satellite, packed with an unlikely nine scientific and commercial payloads, would last in space for six months. But now, just three days shy of a year in space, it is still orbiting Earth nearly 500 kilometres above ground and sending back data at the cool speed of 27,000 kilometres an hour.
“It will next pass over Sydney tonight at 10.26pm, so we will give it a little wave.
“It shows Australia has a great future in the space industry. Thank you to the NSW Government for backing the mission.”
Congratulations to all the teams who made Waratah Seed a reality, including our WS-1 Competition Winning Payload partners; Spiral Blue, EurokaPower, ExtraTerrestrial Power, Dandelions, SperoSpace/Contactile and Deneb Space.
Head to the Waratah Seed WS-1 Mission Dashboard , to give our little Aussie satellite a wave!
