SpaceX puts a next-gen satellite into Earth's orbit that will discover critical minerals

SpaceX recently announced the successful deployment of its Bandwagon-1 mission, which was launched from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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The rideshare mission totaled eleven spacecraft from multiple companies around the world, with the Falcon 9 rocket deploying: KOREA's 425Sat, HawkEye 360's Clusters 8 & 9, Fleet Space Technologies' Centauri-6, iQPS's QPS-SAR-7 TSUKUYOMI-II, Capella Space's Capella-14, and Tata Advanced Systems Limited's TSAT-1A. More specifically, Fleet Space Technologies, the team behind the world's smallest voice-enabled satellite, Centauri-4, issued a press release about the achievement the company has made with the successful deployment of Centauri-6.

According to the South Australian company, which was named Australia's fastest growing company by the Australian Financial Review, Centauri-6 will add to Fleet Space's ever-growing presence in low-Earth orbit that's designed to provide solutions to critical mineral discoveries on Earth's surface without damaging the environment.

Fleet Space developed ExoSphere, a technology that combines satellites, edge computing, AI and geophysics to create 3D subsurface models of a survey area within days. More than 40 industry leading exploration companies have adopted this technology to complete more than 300 surveys looking for a variety of critical minerals.

To create these 3D models, Fleet Space uses satellite-enabled seismic sensors that are spread out over a designated survey area. The data from these sensors is then sent and processed to the company's fleet of satellites located in Earth's orbit. From there, the data is bounced back to Earth where the results are received in near real-time.

"Humanity's expanding satellite infrastructure is rapidly unlocking new capabilities that can help address some of the most pressing challenges facing our planet. At current rates of mineral discoveries and production, our net-zero goals and clean energy future are unattainable in the coming decades," said Flavia Tata Nardini, Co-Founder and CEO of Fleet Space.

"Leveraging the latest advances in space technology, AI, and geophysics - Fleet Space is demonstrating a path to accelerate mineral exploration in a more data-driven, scalable, and sustainable way. Centauri-6 is a portal into a future of efficient, mass-scale satellite manufacturing that can unlock previously unimaginable satellite-enabled solutions to hard problems on Earth," added Nardini

Centauri-6 is a big step forward for the company as it features many upgrades such as improved uplink capacity and redundancy, more resilient data transfer from on-ground seismic sensors, and a solar-powered ion electric propulsion system for in-orbit movement.

"Innovation in microsatellite architectures is advancing at an unprecedented rate, unlocking new capabilities across sectors at scale. The reprogrammability of our Centauri satellites enables in-orbit software updates that can deliver all-new capabilities, as we recently demonstrated with Centauri-4 - making it the world's smallest known voice-enabled satellite," added Matt Pearson, Co-Founder and Chief Exploration Officer at Fleet Space

"This marks a significant leap forward in the history of spacecraft - making a future with more energy-efficient, high-performing, flexible, and resilient microsatellite infrastructure within reach for the global space sector," added Pearson