The last of the four Scouting Mission satellites (KSM1) is currently making its final maneuvers to bring it into the operational formation in the next few hours.
Data is being downlinked allowing the behaviour to be monitored and adjusted and this will continue as necessary throughout the Scouting Mission lifetime.
The Kleos clusters are a first in the commercial world utilizing a combination of four satellites flying in formation with across and along-track positioning designed to optimize independence of cluster approach vector from target location over the areas of the highest value to our customers. The cluster enables up to six antenna pairs to be used in Kleos proprietary multilateration algorithms – positively influencing dilution of precision and data accuracy.
The Scouting Mission satellites allow us to continually test and improve payload performance, operations and algorithms such that improvements can be easily and quickly rolled out to the rest of the fleet/constellation (our next cluster is launching mid-2021) with no/low risk to their operations while maximising their data collection.
