Photo: Luxembourg Space Agency
OQ Technology, a Luxembourg-based satellite Internet of Things (IoT) company, has signed a contract with GomSpace to implement the Tiger mission. The Tiger mission represents a precursor mission to OQ Technology's In-Orbit Demonstration satellite MACSAT. The objective of Tiger is to demonstrate the transmission and reception of OQ Technology's IoT waveform using an existing satellite in space.
The mission will make use of a GOMX-4 satellite, which is part of a research and development mission by GomSpace. It includes two 6U nanosatellites, each weighing 10 kilograms , that work together in formation to perform electronic surveillance in the arctic region. They were launched on February 3, 2018 and are still flying in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO). The satellites carry Software-Defined Radio (SDR) payloads that can be programmed in space. OQ Technology in collaboration with GomSpace will perform the experiment by uplinking the required pieces of the software to send and receive the signals.
"Our vision is that we can simply upload our software to any software-defined radio payload on any other satellite. Given the high level of scalability that we can integrate into our system once it is deployed, we may no longer need to build our own satellites. We could simply transform any flying satellite into an OQ Technology payload host providing our service to the end customer. We are very grateful to GomSpace for allowing us to use their satellite and their SDR for our TIGER mission, we look forward to working with them," said Omar Qaise, CEO of OQ Technology.