Our Australian built and operated sister-satellite, Waratah Seed, has won the SmallSat Mission of the Year award at the SmallSat Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Backed by voting Australians and supported by the judges, Waratah Seed was crowned winner in of a field of 10 missions, including finalists from NASA Goddard, the European Space Agency, Purdue University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University.
The Mission of the Year award is a combination of popular vote and professional jury. The down selection to the finalists is done completely by the jury and then the final winner is informed via popular vote with final input and selection by the jury.
Waratah Seed is a CubeSat with 9 scientific and commercial payloads, backed by the NSW Government through Investment NSW, and sponsored by SmartSat CRC, space companies, and a consortium of universities led by the University of Sydney.
Follow the Waratah Seed-1 satellite at this link .
Waratah Seed was the only Australian finalist in the SmallSat Mission of the Year hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Mission leader Professor Cairns from CUAVA said:
“We are all thrilled to have won this award. It is testament to the engineering and scientific ingenuity of our team at the University of Sydney, UTS, Macquarie University and our industry partners at Saber Astronautics, Delta-V and the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at UNSW.
“We thought our little Aussie satellite, packed with an unlikely nine scientific and commercial payloads, would last in space for six months. But now, just three days shy of a year in space, it is still orbiting Earth nearly 500 kilometres above ground and sending back data at the cool speed of 27,000 kilometres an hour.
“It will next pass over Sydney tonight at 10.26pm, so we will give it a little wave.
“It shows Australia has a great future in the space industry. Thank you to the NSW Government for backing the mission.”
