“Družice will monitor other phenomena connected with nature, in various corners of the world. It will monitor the melting of glaciers in the Alps and Greenland, photograph agricultural land in Africa and monitor how the rising sea level gradually floods the islands in the Maldives,” TRL Space CEO Petr Kapoun told Novinka.
Satellite with a special camera
The Falcon 9 launch went without any problems. Its current mission is called Transporter 12. The rocket carried a total of 131 satellites, mainly minisatellites, from several countries into orbit at a height of approximately 550 kilometers above the earth’s surface.
The first contact with the TROLL satellite should take place on Tuesday just before midnight. The device will orbit the Earth at an altitude of approximately 510 kilometers. Soon after the first contact, the device should start sending processed images to Brno.
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“The successful launch of Falcon 9 with the TROLL satellite is an extraordinary success. After the successful revival of the satellite, we can look forward to a stream of extremely valuable data that will be widely used,” said the director of the Brno observatory, astronomer Jiří Dušek, about the project.
Several Brno space companies participated in the production of the TROLL apparatus. The development of the satellite for approximately 37.5 million crowns took two years. The device is a great success of Czech science. In addition, a team of cartographers from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University in Prague created a special methodology for the acquisition and processing of remote sensing data for this project.
“TROLL is a Czech technology, so we want the satellite to bring the greatest possible benefit to the Czech Republic. Of course, we will also process data for clients from abroad,” said Kapoun.
Data from the satellite will be used, among other things. Czech Environmental Inspection (ČIŽP). The hyperspectral camera will help detect not only black dumps in nature, but also impurities discharged into waterways from industrial complexes.
“Thanks to this advanced technology, we will be able to substantially refine our surveillance activities and, above all, to detect illegal environmental damage, which we would otherwise not even have to learn about,” commented the director of the inspection, Petr Bejček, about the new space project.
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Joint success of domestic space companies
With its hyperspectral camera, TROLL is technically unique on a global level. There are only very few satellites that provide high-resolution images in the Earth’s orbit.
The TROLL mission is a commercial project. “We are treading a new, commercial path. We invested in building and launching our own satellite. We will operate it and sell the data from it,” said Kapoun.
TRL Space belongs to the important Brno space companies, which are extremely successful in the Moravian metropolis. The company is primarily a well-known manufacturer of small satellites, the so-called CubeSats.
The TROLL mission is not only important for TRL Space, but also for other Brno space companies from the Brno Space Cluster, which they jointly founded for mutual cooperation in 2021.
“They will become more friendly to customers and will be able to be actively offered on the market. Globally, the Czech Republic advances this project and shows the unity and progress of the Czech space industry, thanks to which we can look at even more ambitious projects in the future,” Kapoun added.
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