Inovor Technologies in Adelaide wins 2019 Avalon national award for its nanosatellite platform and app
Inovor Technologies chief executive Dr Matt Tetlow speaking after the Adelaide company won the 2019 Avalon Australian innovation award for space operations and technology with novel nanosatellite platform.
Image courtesy Inovor Technologies
Inovor Technologies continued its stellar rise in 2019 – the year it moved, along with the Australian Space Agency, into Lot Fourteen innovation precinct in Adelaide city.
In 2019, Inovor Technologies was awarded the Avalon Australian innovation award for space operations and technology. The award was for developing a novel nanosatellite platform and a unique application for space situational awareness: keeping track of objects in orbit and predicting where they would be at any given time.
The Inovor Technologies nanosatellite platform had all subsystems needed to support a payload in space, including the primary structure, power system, pointing control, mission control and health monitoring. It was part of Project Hyperion, is a constellation of nanosatellites operating in low Earth orbit (LEO), looking away from Earth to monitor the high-value geostationary Earth orbit and medium Earth orbit.
Inovor Technologies partnered with Adelaide University’s world-leading Australian Institute for Machine Learning to developing a space situational awareness alogorithm. A $5.7 million contract was awarded by the federal government to Inovor Technologies to deliver its prototype nanosatellite that would enhance space situational awareness.
Inovor Technologies also won a the contract to deliver a satellite bus that will be used to house equipment in space for the Buccaneer main mission. The mission aimed to improve understanding of the outer atmosphere, in particular the ionosphere, that played a key role in Australia’s world-leading over-the-horizon radar capability. Small, low-cost satellites like Buccaneer provided a chance to support an Australian space capability for defence and to rejuvenate Australian space research.
