"Roskosmos" plans to launch a new spy satellite

Photo: TASS / Mikhail Dzhaparidze

The Roscosmos enterprises have developed the newest reconnaissance satellite to control the earth’s surface, Izvestia reports. The advantages of this satellite are compactness and low weight, which is only a few hundred kilograms. According to experts, this is several times less than that of existing devices that perform the same work.

Advantages of the satellite include shooting the Earth in high resolution, including sub-meter. The customer of the satellite was the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. In the future, with the help of the device, the military plan to deploy a satellite fleet that will monitor what is happening on the surface of the entire Earth, due to several rocket launches.

A source from the rocket and space industry said that the device was called the "experimental small spacecraft" (EMKA). Its developer was VNIIEM Corporation, which is one of the leading developers of Earth remote sensing satellites (ERS). The device is planned to be launched into orbit at the very beginning of 2018. Initially, they were going to start in October of this year, but then the dates changed - the start was postponed, first to November, and then to December. The postponement was caused by the solution of some technical problems with EMKA. During the test, faults were identified that need to be rectified.
')
The launch of the satellite in 2018 will be carried out from the Plesetsk military cosmodrome with the help of the Soyuz-2.1 V light launch vehicle.

The relatively rapid growth in the number of launches of nano and microsatellites began in 2013. Then about 100 similar systems were put into orbit. At the end of the year it is planned to launch about 200 more such satellites. One private company, Planets Labs, has about 150 small satellites. And this allows you to take pictures of the same area at intervals of about once a day.