Anduril says a satellite it built and paid for itself has completed a demonstration of an infrared sensor meant to track spacecraft that hide their maneuvers in Earth's shadow.
The company reported the result Tuesday. The oven-sized satellite, Anduril-216, launched in July on a SpaceX rideshare mission, meaning it shared a ride with other customers' payloads. It carries three demo payloads: an edge-compute processor, which handles data on the spacecraft instead of sending it all to the ground; a power-management system the company said can be adapted to different missions; and a long-wave infrared sensor capable of seeing other objects in orbit. Anduril funded the mission with its own capital.
Anduril-216 flies about 590 km (366 mi) above Earth and spends roughly one-third of each orbit in darkness. Those night passes are where the infrared imager is meant to shine, the company said.
The design logic is straightforward. Visible-light cameras need sunlight bouncing off an object, while infrared sensors pick up heat. A spacecraft that slips into Earth's shadow to change course disappears from the first kind of camera, but not necessarily from the second. That gap is what this sensor targets.
The caveat is what the announcement leaves out. As described, it gives no detection ranges, image quality, or count of objects tracked, and "successful" is the company's own word. Those numbers will decide whether this is a useful tracking tool or a technology demo that stays one.