The satellite will receive and transmit signals from an automatic identification system to track the movement of ships and monitor activities at sea
HANOI, August 13. /TASS/. Vietnam has delivered its NanoDragon satellite to Japan for an upcoming launch into low-Earth orbit. This was reported on Friday by the newspaper "Nyan Zan" with reference to the National Space Center (NCC) at the Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology.
The NanoDragon satellite, which weighs 3.8 kg, was developed, assembled and tested by NCC specialists. Now the device has been transferred to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA, JAXA), where it will undergo additional testing before launch. The launch itself is planned for the period until March 2022 from the site of the Uchinura Space Center in the southwestern Kagoshima Prefecture, located at a distance of 1 thousand km from Tokyo. NanoDragon will receive and transmit signals from an automatic identification system to track the movement of ships and monitor activities at sea.
Currently, Vietnam has five spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. In April 2008, Hanoi put into orbit the first ever own telecommunications satellite VINASat-1, built by order of the Vietnamese government in the United States. In May 2012, VINASat-2 was already launched, also created by American developers. The third satellite launched by Vietnam was the research VNREDSat-1A, which was put into orbit in May 2013, and in November of the same year, the Vietnamese space group increased due to the PicoDragon research satellite. In January 2019, another MicroDragon research satellite was launched into orbit to assess the quality of seawater, determine the state of marine resources and observe natural phenomena occurring along the Vietnamese coast.
The next stage of the Vietnamese space program will be the independent creation of commercial satellites LOTUSat-1 and LOTUSat-2 by local scientists. These devices weighing about 600 kg and with a service life in orbit of about five years will be used for photographing the Earth's surface and monitoring the migration processes of wild animals and marine life, as well as for predicting natural disasters in order to minimize their damage.
In accordance with the state space program approved several years ago, Vietnam sets itself a very ambitious task: in the period up to 2030, the country intends to become a leader in space exploration in Southeast Asia.
