Mawson Rovers reaches orbit on Waratah Seed-1
Mawson Rovers has hardware in space. The Waratah Seed-1 spacecraft, carrying a payload we built with the University of Technology Sydney, reached orbit this morning aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission.
Transporter-11 launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and Waratah Seed-1 deployed at 4:35am Sydney time on 17 August 2024 into a sun-synchronous orbit at around 513 km altitude. It is Australia’s first commercial rideshare spacecraft, carrying payloads from six NSW space companies, and flew alongside its sister spacecraft CUAVA-2.
This is the first spaceflight heritage for Mawson Rovers, and the culmination of a project we announced in March 2022.
Matilda
The payload is called Matilda, and it demonstrates a new approach to spacecraft thermal management. UTS developed a 3D-printed structure with an integrated phase-change material, which absorbs heat as it melts. Mawson Rovers built the payload electronics and the software that controls the heater and collects thermal data in orbit.
Our electronics board, codenamed Hestia, uses a heater element to simulate the heat output of a high-performance computing chip, then measures how the structure responds. Better thermal control means spacecraft can run more capable processors for longer, which matters for earth observation missions doing on-board processing.
The work was carried out with the UTS School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering and Spiral Blue, under the UTS Resilient Space Computing Initiative. We delivered the first complete system to UTS for vacuum testing in December 2022, and handed the flight payload to the Waratah Seed team in September 2023. The electronics designs and flight software are open source.
“Getting our hardware to orbit is a tremendous milestone for our company,” said Matt Ryall, CEO and Co-founder at Mawson Rovers. “We have worked hard to deliver on time while meeting the challenging technical requirements to operate in space. This is a great start in our mission of growing advanced capabilities in the Australian space industry.”
Once the Waratah Seed-1 spacecraft is fully commissioned in the weeks ahead, Matilda will run its thermal experiments over the course of the six-month mission.
For more information, please contact: [email protected]