Dhruva Space’s Thybolt Mission concludes after 15,000 combined orbits from both satellites

Dhruva Space's maiden satellite mission comprising Thybolt-1 and Thybolt-2 satellites have successfully and securely deorbited after a combined 15,000 orbits in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

The mission launched on 26 November, 2022 – which happened to be Dhruva Space's 10th anniversary – at 11:56 am, onboard ISRO PSLV-C54. In 2022, Dhruva Space became one of the first private companies in India to receive authorisation for Space activity, from regulatory authority IN-SPACe.

The payload used on the Thybolt satellites is a novel Store-and-Forward payload receiving messages from sensor nodes or remote Ground Stations; it also stores the aforementioned messages on-board flash memory for downlinking them at a network connected ground station. The mission engaged many ham radio operators across India as well. 

Observing the milestone, Sanjay Nekkanti, Chief Executive Officer, Dhruva Space, says, “It is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our entire team who contributed a great deal of success to the Thybolt Mission, and demonstrating the prowess of our in-house developed P-DoT satellite platform to enable advancements in research, constellation development and application-agnostic use by customers.” 

Nekkanti concludes, “We’d like to thank ISRO, IN-SPACe and NewSpace India Limited for always lending their support to New Space players like Dhruva Space. There is much ahead, including the establishment of our 280,000 sq-ft spacecraft manufacturing facility, and our first hosted payload mission LEAP-1, just around the corner, using our 30kg nanosatellite."

Currently, Dhruva Space is working on its first hosted payload mission LEAP-1 which is slated to launch via ISRO later this year. This mission is set to be launched onboard Dhruva Space's P-30 nanosatellite platform, which was Space-qualified via ISRO's PSLV C58 POEM-3 on 01 January 2024 through Dhruva Space's LEAP-TD mission.