Taiwan’s first locally made global positioning system (GPS) receiver for satellite missions has functioned normally and passed key environmental tests during nearly two months in space, raising hopes for Taiwan’s home-grown satellite development program.
The developer of the GPS receiver, the National Space Organization (NSPO), said Thursday in a statement that the device was launched into space on a Taiwan-developed IRIS-A CubeSat on Jan. 14 and has since orbited 500 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
Since then, the NPSO said, the receiver has operated normally and passed rigorous environmental tests, in the process gaining “flight heritage,” a term used to describe the situation when a technology works in a commercially representative environment.
The more flight heritage a space device accumulates, the more credibility and trust it builds and the more commercially viable it becomes, but it can be hard for product developers to get their products into orbit.
The NPSO did that by hitching a ride on a cubesat — a miniature satellite used primarily for space research. It teamed up with National Cheng Kung University, which developed the IRIS-A CubeSat, to get the GPS device into space.
NSPO Director Wu Jong-shinn (???) said the GPS product’s initial success represents a key step in the agency’s drive to develop and produce satellites with 70 percent of their components made in Taiwan.
Taiwan has previously relied on foreign GPS receivers for its home-grown satellites, but that is changing, according to Wu.
The NPSO space-borne GPS receiver is set to be used in an NSPO-manufactured “wind-hunter” satellite, called the Triton, which is to be launched by the end of this year, Formosat-8 satellites, and synthetic aperture radar satellites, he said.
GPS systems represent a key technology in the space industry, the NPSO said, and the GPS receiver it developed will improve satellites’ ability to navigate and reduce the cost of satellite missions.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel